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“The five percent”, is a common intonation somewhat similar to the associating American citizens at present, as on top of the infamous “We’re the ninety-nine percent” Occupy Wall Street chants that have escalated through the US and the world in general.
AT&T has now implemented a similar scenario by throttling its “top five percent data users” to 2G speeds. Breaking the news in a, some could say cowardly fashion; AT&T subscribers received the news via text message.
According to Cult of Mac, the text message received by several subscribers read:

“Your data usage is among the top five percent of users. Data speeds for the rest of your account bill may be reduced.”

AT&T’s threatening of throttling heavy data users began in October this year, when the company announced a message targeting the top five percent of data users. Published on Cult of Mac, AT&T’s message read:

“Starting October 1, smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. These customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle. Before you are affected, we will provide multiple notices, including a grace period.”

As we can see this week’s ‘threat’ by AT&T basically mirrors the one made back in October and gives no indication to users to just how much data they have to use to be affected. AT&T does however claim that the move should only affect jailbreakers on unlimited plans who are using tethering Cydia hacks to avoid subscribing to the official AT&T tethering plan.
Although this claim is dismissed by many a livid AT&T subscriber who have received the unwelcome warning despite being subscribed onto an official AT&T plan and using only a modest amount of data, as Zach Sklar posted on Cult of Mac, “I have an unlimited plan and I got this notice after only using 2.5GB of data last month!!! This is criminal of AT&T and a group lawsuit amongst their customers’ needs to begin.”
I don’t know about a lawsuit but AT&T is not doing itself any favors and users are unlikely to put up with having their data throttled to a snail’s pace and will invariably find another network for their iphone – Sprint for example, which currently has no data limits.
[via Cult of Mac]