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Last updated: Wednesday, December 9, 2009

In the aftermath of a bruising advertising battle with Verizon Wireless that highlighted the limitations of AT&T’s 3G network, an AT&T executive told investors that high-bandwidth iPhone users could face higher usage charges. Ralph de la Vega, AT&T’s head of consumer services, told investors at a UBS conference in New York that people who consume a large amount of data would receive incentives to “reduce or modify their usage,” the Associated Press reported. He offered no specifics on how or when the surcharges could go into effect, but said the change is inevitable, according to press reports. One problem with the notion of punishing consumers for excessive data usage is that AT&T doesn’t provide any meaningful tools to keep track of how much data they’re downloading. Punishing Users “We need to educate the customer … We’ve got to get them to understand what represents a megabyte of data,” de la Vega said. “We’re improving all our systems to let consumers get real-time information on their data usage.” Given that AT&T’s network appears to be inferior to those of Verizon and Sprint Nextel, and that iPhones consume far more data than other smartphones — thanks in part to music-streaming services like Pandora and LaLa, the announcement could be viewed as a scheme to squeeze users to compensate for network weakness. That’s how Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, sees it. “They’re trying to just relieve some of the pressure on the network. It looks like it would include monitoring, and it has to involve pricing or penalties for excessive use,” he said. In a market with downward price pressures, “this just seems like a really bad strategy,” Sterling said. “You’re just gong to drive people away. Sprint and Verizon will be making hay out of this. They’ll say we have a better network with no…

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AT&T Threatens To Penalize Heavy iPhone Data Users

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