It’s beginning to sound like a broken record but AT&T is once again facing fines for throttling their ‘unlimited’ data plan customers. As we’ve heard before on a number of occasions (and from a number of providers) once customers hit a certain limit AT&T throttles their data rates until the next billing cycle rolls around. According to the FCC sometimes the reduction in speed (as much as 90%) made using the internet nearly impossible.
And the list of customer abuses goes on and on. Back in September 2014 AT&T was fined $105 million for a cramming scheme. In October 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for throttling. In April this year AT&T was fined $25 million for leaking data of 280,000 customers.
But to be fair it should be mentioned that within the past year Verizon Wireless was fined $90 million for cramming, Sprint Corporation was fined $68 million for cramming and T-Mobile was also fined $112.5 million for cramming.
To me it seems obvious that these piddling little hundred million dollar fines don’t even get these company’s attention. The fines are supposed to punish these companies so that hopefully they won’t do this kind of stuff again.
Yet they continue to pull the same stunts over and over again.
Unfortunately AT&T and the others have made literally billions of dollars cheating their customers (above and beyond the billions of dollars they made legitimately) so a $100 million fine every year of two isn’t really much of a deterant.
