Report Analyzes Cell Phone Use: Is Data Throttling Merely a Ploy?

By Karla Robinson
February 28, 2012

“Are the carriers throttling because of wild and crazy unlimited users hogging enormous bandwidth, or are the carriers throttling as essentially a tactic to get grandfathered unlimited users to hurry up and switch to tiered data plans?” asks monitoring firm Validas in a report concerning data throttling.
“The company analyzed data from more than 55,000 cell phone bills, and concluded that customers on unlimited plans aren’t actually using any more data than everybody else,” reports TG Daily.
“When we look at the top five percent of data users, there is virtually no difference in data consumption between those on unlimited and those on tiered plans — and yet the unlimited consumers are the ones at risk of getting their service turned off,” says Validas.
AT&T is starting to limit speeds for users in the top five percent of data usage, but according to the report, throttling doesn’t significantly help network bandwidth issues.

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