Major US telco is being sued by US gov’t
US telco AT&T is being sued by the US government for millions of dollars for misleading its millions of subscribers who where promised “unlimited data”, but were throttled back by the company when they went over a certain limit.
The Federal Trade Commission (the rough equivalent of DTI here in the PH) filed the complaint against the telco in behalf of the 3.5 million consumers that has been affected by AT&T’s throttling practice. “If you make a promise about unlimited service, we expect you to fulfill those promises,” FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said as she announced the lawsuit.
Additionally, Ramirez said that AT&T’s throttling program, which started in 2011, did not stem from any congestion issues, which is usually the excuse that telcos use to justify these practices.
With AT&T being sued by the US government, we wonder if the DTI would act on customer complaints about throttling in the PH? We’ve seen how angry pinoy subscribers were when Globe started clamping down on people going over the measly 1.5GB of monthly mobile data before. Does the DTI have enough muscle (or the political will) to represent the interest of the public when it comes to this issue? What do you think?
