Yesterday, AT&T announced that they would effectively end truly unlimited data plans by throttling all users who exceed 3 gigabytes per month of 3g or 5 gigabytes per month on 4G LTE.
This comes just as app makers are facing the daunting reality that they will have to upgrade the graphical displays of their iPad apps to the high resolution required for Apple’s newest tablet release. In many cases this will double the size of their apps and make it impossible for them to be downloaded under the 20MB limit imposed by the carriers.
For developers, this limitation will obviously serve to curtail our expansion and innovation into apps that provide feature-rich content requiring greater data usage. This is hugely disappointing to the mobile app developer community.
But what we can’t say is that we didn’t see this coming. For months, we have been beating the drum to get more spectrum, towers and fiber into the system as soon as possible to alleviate the very obvious explosion in data usage.
Every day we saw new statistics about the number of mobile apps in the marketplace, and the 9000% increase in data used by those apps. Without some kind of increase in the infrastructure that supports the mobile ecosystem, limitations like today’s were a foregone conclusion.
On the wireline side we have seen data rates per dollar skyrocket. It’s not unusual for today’s FiOS customer to get 25 Megabit per second download speeds and very nearly limitless data usage for what 10 years ago would have gotten you only a step or two above dialup.
Cable companies add the advantage that they could put more fiber, the medium through which information travels, into use without asking for permission.
However for wireless, spectrum is the medium, and a finite resource. Right now, huge swaths of spectrum are held, but unused by government agencies, and more is tied up with the old over-the-air television system. Only government action can “shake the tree” and get more spectrum into the marketplace to relieve the congestion.
We hope that the FCC and other agencies take a look at AT&T’s actions as a clear message and move quickly to auction off the currently discussed spectrum allocations as well as beginning the push to free up other spectrum controlled, but unused by the Department of Defense and other agencies.