If you’re still clinging to an unlimited data plan on AT&T, first of all: congratulations, you lucky dog. Second: you’ll be glad to hear that your threshold for throttling has been significantly increased.
AT&T has tweaked its network management policies, increasing the amount of data usage that a user is required to hit before their data will be throttled in congested areas. The threshold is now 22GB, a major increase from the 5GB limit that was previously in place. Says AT&T:
“In line with common industry standards, our network management practices assure that our network resources are used for the benefit of all our mobile broadband customers especially during periods when network demand exceeds available network resources (also known as "congestion").
As you would expect, these network management practices have continued to evolve over time to benefit our customers and take advantage of the billions we have spent to expand and augment our networks. As a result of this evolution, we recently revised our practices such that Unlimited Data Plan smartphone customers can now use 22GB of high-speed data during a billing period before becoming subject to network management practices that might result in reduced data speeds and increased latency.”
While I’m sure most unlimited users would prefer that no throttling happen, this is a major threshold increase that’ll allow unlimited data plan users to consume more than 4 times the amount of data before possibly being subject to throttling. It’s actually kind of surprising to see such a major increase, but it’s one of those welcome surprises that I’m glad to see.