We never figured EVERYBODY would use it
AT&T no longer offers an “unlimited” data plan for mobile users. It’s not a surprise; AT&T hasn’t had the capacity it needed for its early-adopter-heavy mobile uses for several years. You saw it in the fractured and nearly unusable connectivity where geeks gather, like during the South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, or during any of the tech-hip conventions like the NAB in Vegas.
3G coverage falls apart, downloading anything more than a few KB can fail for hours. As AT&T piles more early adopters onto its network adding new Windows 7 Mobile devices later this year, plus the faster multitasking iPhones almost certain to come out this month, it faces a burgeoning crisis.
So I can’t blame them for making the change, but I can chastise them for offering unlimited connectivity in the first place. Since these plans are in fact limited by the ability of the network to handle the traffic, they have never really been unlimited at all.
What is changing is consumers are expecting quality of service. The new devices are much better at eating bandwidth than the old ones, and much more likely to appear to misbehave when the underlying connection is the thing that is failing. We can only hope that if the new charges don’t curtail usage, the new revenue will be plowed back into capacity increases.
From the beginning, we talked a good game but never really planned that everybody would be using the Internet to the extent they are. When it was just the geeks passing the HD video files back and forth we could be bandwidth pigs and the folks reading plain-text email barely noticed the lag we caused. Those days are over, and with it, the AT&T “unlimited” data plan.
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