AT&T subscribers who have managed to hold on to one of the carrier’s grandfathered unlimited data plans have not been running into such great luck lately. We recently learned of AT&T’s plans to start throttling the connections of unlimited users who fall into the top 5% of AT&T’s bandwidth consumers. Now the carrier is starting to get serious with its threats towards unauthorized tethering, and unlimited users who continue to do so will get their plans changed automatically, losing unlimited data forever.

We’ve been seeing threats against tetherers – specifically against users of jailbroken iPhones – for months now, but apparently AT&T is stepping-up its efforts to enforce the terms of its service agreements. That means that if you’ve been tethering over your unlimited plan, and AT&T has caught you in the act, you’ll be moved to a 2GB tethering plan unless you cut it out. With 2GB of tethering data on top of a 2GB tiered data plan, you’d see your data bill alone go up to $45 a month.

We may not be fans of treating one byte differently from another, depending on what they’re being used for, but AT&T is being quite upfront about what it’s doing, and is giving users time to take steps to keep their unlimited plans, so we suppose we can’t be too cross with the carrier. If you have received a notice of unauthorized tethering from AT&T, make sure you act on it before it’s too late.

Source: 9 to 5 Mac

Via: BGR