Are you getting throttled into paying more for your wireless coverage?

The mobile intelligence company Validas recently looked into what kind of speeds people are getting on all these plans, specifically customers who use a lot of data. “So we took a look at the data usage of those top 5 percent for both tiered and unlimited plans on Verizon and AT&T,” says Dylan Breslin-Barnhart of Validas, “and interestingly what we found is for, especially for Verizon it was most remarkable that, ultimately, it doesn't matter if you're on tiered or unlimited, if you're in the top 5 percent bracket, you're using about the same amount of data.” But your experiences could be pretty different.

Validas found that customers on the unlimited plans were getting throttled, their data was moving slower than customers using the same amount of data on tiered plans. The tiered customers were enjoying a streaming episode of "Mad Men," everything’s great. The unlimited customers were getting buffering messages, hiccups, delays, they had no idea what Don Draper was up to. Why are the wireless carriers doing such a thing? “The argument that they're making is that the people on unlimited plans are data hogs,” says Mike Masnick, editor of Techdirt, “and are using way too much data and are causing congestion for everyone else.” But why is the network slow for some customers and not others? Masnick thinks the networks don’t want customers on unlimited plans at lower rates, they want everyone to be tiered. “Well, it appears that they have plenty of bandwidth,” he says, “and what they're really trying to do is push you into paying more money for the same thing.”