AT&T decides against appeal, pays angry customer $935 in throttling case

The word throttled sounds violent and no one like to have their data speeds throttled by their carrier, especially after using just 2GB of data in a month. But that is what has occurred to some AT&T customers despite the carrier's insistence that it only turns the faucet handle on those in the top 5% of data users. Enter Matt Spacarelli. The AT&T customer decided to take the carrier to small claims court and back in February, won an $850 judgment against the carrier, plus $85 in court costs. The court ruled that AT&T violated its TOS.

The carrier had said it would appeal the verdict, but probably decided that it was too much of a PR disaster and decided to just pay Spacarelli $935 to end the case. The problem that happened here is not so much that a customer got throttled, but that it happened after using so little data. So AT&T is changing its throttling threshold. From now on, users can only be throttled if they used more than 3GB of data in a month and 4G LTE users can go up to 5GB without retribution. Of course, you still have to be among the top 5% of data users to, ahem, qualify for the throttling. Believe it or not, Spacarelli's phone is still being throttled as he had a .31 Mbps download speed on Saturday.

As for Matt Spacarelli, he is now using a newly purchased second Apple iPhone with a SIM card plugged in from reseller Straight Talk. He is now getting 3.83Mbps on AT&T's 3G network and paying just $45 a month for unlimited talk, text and data with no contract.

source: Mashable via Phandroid