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AT&T unlimited data plans get a little more "unlimited" before LTE throttling

Still clinging to that old unlimited data plan on AT&T's network? You can use up to 22 GB of LTE data in a month before the carrier artificially slows your speeds.
Written by Kevin Tofel, Contributor

Good news if you're one of the few that has kept an unlimited data plan from AT&T for all these years: You can use more monthly data before the carrier slows your speeds for network congestion.

AT&T is raising the limit of data use from 5 GB a month to 22 GB prior to reducing LTE bandwidth, notes 9to5 Mac. AT&T's own support page for unlimited data plan customers confirms the change.

While AT&T has long advertised the plans as "unlimited" it has in the past had to throttle down speeds of some customers.

The claim is that such bandwidth hogs can disrupt service of other paying customers and the carrier can't guarantee speeds to those not on unlimited plans as a result. T-Mobile recently took a more aggressive stance, calling a small percentage of its subscriber base "hackers" that are stealing hotspot data.

Chances are, relatively few of AT&T's nearly 124 million wireless subscribers are actually on an unlimited data plan. The company did away with them several years ago, so the only customers with unlimited data have kept their same plan since then. Once you change your data plan to something other than the old unlimited plan, you can't get it back.

That likely has much to do with the new policy, which raises the level of monthly data usage by nearly 4.5 times before speeds are artificially slowed in a billing cycle.

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