AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA all practice data throttling, which involves slowing Internet transfer speeds for cellphone customers who use too much data. This policy applies only to customers with unlimited data plans, and the cellphone companies say it is intended to prevent data hogs from overloading the network and clogging it for everyone else. However, a new study suggests that throttling doesn’t address excessive data use at all.
Validas, a company that analyzes wireless bills, said it looked at data from 55,000 cellphone bills from AT&T and Verizon subscribers in 2011. Depending on the conditions of their networks, AT&T and Verizon sometimes throttle customers who are in the top 5 percent of data users. So Validas analyzed data use on bills from unlimited data plans and customers on limited, tiered plans to calculate the amount of data used by the top 5 percent for each type of customer.
The results? For Verizon bills, the top 5 percent of data customers on unlimited plans used nearly the same amount of data as those on tiered plans. And for AT&T, the top 5 percent of customers on unlimited data plans used only slightly more data than those on limited plans.
“When we look at the Top 5 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,” Validas wrote in a blog post. “So it’s curious that anyone would think the throttling here represents a serious effort at alleviating network bandwidth issues.”
Validas raises the question of whether the carriers were throttling simply because they want unlimited data customers to switch to limited, tiered plans. It is a befuddling question because it could potentially cost customers more over time. After all, how can a network be out of capacity if it can serve a customer on a limited plan without throttling if the heaviest data users on both limited and unlimited plans are consuming roughly the same amount of data?
Whatever the case may be, there’s plenty of discussion in the wireless industry about network management. This month I reported on Volubill, a company based in London that advises wireless companies on charging policies. That company suggested that carriers could provide data plans for specific types of use, like consuming heavy amounts of video or playing many online games. There will be more to come next week about this topic at Mobile World Congress, the telecommunications conference in Barcelona.