Sophomore Sasha Samilov quietly surfs the web on his iPhone, loading web pages and videos in a relatively short amount of time. However, upon the next link clicked, Samilov’s Internet speed drops to a complete crawl.

AT&T has been “throttling,” or slowing Internet speed, the connections of customers, like Samilov, who approach 3GB of data usage in a billing cycle even if the customer purchased an unlimited data plan. Recently a man won a court case last February against AT&T for throttling his Internet speed.

When the man called AT&T to claim his $850 judgement, they threatened to terminate his service if he does not stop talking about his court victory and talk with AT&T representatives for a different settlement.

Samilov has been following the events unfold and sided against AT&T.

“I think it’s unfair [for AT&T to throttle speeds] because I am paying for unlimited data,” he said. “It’s not really unlimited if I can barely even get past that threshold.”

Junior Todd Nguyen agrees with Samilov, but understands AT&T’s reasoning to throttle.
“Throttling is kind of stupid when they advertise fast speeds,” Nguyen said. “But unlimited data can really slow down a network so I understand why they do it.”

Samilov said that he originally thought it was just the area he was in when he experienced the slower speeds, but soon saw it was a common problem.

“I thought it was just me for a while,” he said. “But when more people complained about [the slower speeds], I knew it was affecting everyone.”

After this realization, Samilov began to read news articles about it, he said. Nguyen said he doesn’t experience the slowing down, but learned about the problem on a website called Reddit that aggregates anything of interest on the Internet into a convenient hub.

“I started following the court cases because the verdicts could influence my decision to switch to another carrier,” Samilov said.