Back in 2010, AT&T stopped providing their unlimited data plan. Fortunately for users who purchased the unlimited data plan beforehand were grandfathered in to the unlimited plan. That’s definitely good news for people who love using unlimited data, until now. AT&T has officially announced that they will be throttling the top 5% of users who use the most data. Basically the more you use your phone for data transmission, the more likely you are to be penalized. Will the top 5% affect you? You will not know until you receive a text from AT&T notifying you that you are in the top 5% of data users.

 So, let’s say you make sure to always backup your music and movies on the apple cloud, you watch an episode of your favorite sit-com on Netflix, and you send a few business emails all within the first week of your billing cycle. Then you receive a text from AT&T notifying you to slow down your data usage or you will experience slower data speeds. WTF, this is ridiculous, right? Now you have to be cautious for the remaining three weeks of your billing cycle or you are likely to experience data speeds as slow as dial up, making your smart phone virtually useless. AT&T says that they still provide the unlimited plan, but they never promised an unlimited 3G speed data plan. A representative from AT&T speaking as an outsider explains, “They just guaranteed the highway. They didn’t guarantee the speed limit.”

Is there anything you can do about this? Well… Absolutely, you can switch from the unlimited plan to their tiered data plan. You’ll probably get more data usage out of one of the tiered plans then using their unlimited plan. It seems that AT&T is trying to squeeze users out of their unlimited data plan. Perhaps this can be preparation for the, soon to be released, iPad3 which has been rumored to provide 4G LTE speeds. No matter the reason, this throttling of users “unlimited” data seems pretty shady, AT&T. Perhaps now might be a good time to switch to a new provider. Once customers don’t have trust, there’s not much else to hang onto.

Verizon and other providers make users aware that if a specific tower is being clogged with a lot of data, they may slow the speeds of the users in that area, until more data is available. That’s totally reasonable, unlike AT&T’s throttling which targets individual users. You can read more about the data throttling from an article written by the HuffingtonPost.