Waiting for the bandwidth hammer to fall - AT&Ts mobile data threats made simple

This week saw AT&T making some bold announcements concerning flat-rates for mobile data users… and not in the direction that you might want. The high amount of data being consumed by a small segment of the mobile using public has caused AT&Ts head of Wireless, Ralph de la Vega, to make some pretty non-specific threats aimed at high data users.

What has happened here, exactly?

AT&T is getting angry at a very particular kind of subscriber behavior. Mobile devices have made a very sudden leap in the amount of data they can handle in the last two years. As a result, those who are interested in using mobile internet have discovered they can vastly increase the amount of things they can do with their devices. And the networks have discovered that a small, phone-loving consumer segment can use a truly staggering amount of data.

This is what is annoying De la Vega, anyway, who made his announcement at an investor conference in New York yesterday. The overall gist of his ominous pronouncements was this: since 3% of the AT&T consumer is gobbling 40% of the network capacity, steps are going to be taken to force this 3% to reduce their data consumption. The massive data usage figures are causing problems for AT&T, as their network is having real trouble handling the sheer amount of traffic that mobile users are creating.

What is AT&T going to do about this?

You can probably kiss flat rates goodbye for starters. De la Vega wants AT&T consumers to understand how much data they’re consuming, and flat rate data plans make that pretty much impossible. Any plans that AT&T are considering are going to be instituted in the long term, and no definite decisions have been made yet. But AT&T are seriously considering switching to a strict data-metering strucutre, where each byte of data that you use will be carefully measured and charged.

What we think?

I think that’s a terrible idea. I don’t disagree that greedy data consumption by consumers is causing AT&T to sweat - but I disagree that it’s the consumers that are greedy, which is what de la Vega seems to think. In much the same way that a gas will expand to fill it’s container, mobile internet advocates will use the services that are offered to them. It’s ridiculous of AT&T to blame its customers for making good use of services that AT&T enabled.

So now AT&T wants to cut back on data usage. That’s great - but punishing customers who use a lot of data isn’t the way to do it. The main culprits in the mobile data consumption game are streaming applications that can move audio and movie files to devices at a constant rate - causing a massive amount of data traffic day and night.

But these services aren’t at fault either. The problem here is that operators like AT&T threw open the doors to devices like the iPhone, and services like the Application Store, in order draw consumers onto the mobile internet - but now AT&T is pretty much admitting that it took this step before it could handle it. This is simply a matter of AT&Ts lack of forethought. If they couldn’t handle the traffic, they shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place.

No matter what avenue they choose, it’s a fact that AT&T will be reducing the amount of data that its customers can use. I can’t really think of any way they can do it without causing a PR shit-storm. No matter what they do, it will cause trouble. If they target the consumers through data caps and higher charges, the consumers will get pissed off. If they target developers of high-data usage applications, then both developers and customers will get angry. It’s a lose-lose situation for AT&T, caused by its own choice to enable a massive amount of data traffic on a network that can’t handle it.