[AT&T Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-I777] SmittyRN:
It's still an "All You Can Eat" buffet, fatboy..... we are just gonna take your plate away and make you use this little saucer after the 3rd trip to the line.

Edit: Or, I guess, you can pay the same price for the three plates full, and we will just charge you extra for each additional plate.

Try to follow me here, and someone tell me if I'm wrong.

Right now, I'm paying $30/mo for my old "unlimited" plan. Haven't been throttled yet, but I can expect to if I keep using data up the way I do.

I'm well over 3gb/mo. It's because I stream a lot of Pandora/Spotify/Tunein when I'm working in my hospital unit at night. Otherwise, I rarely do much streaming with the phone, though I am starting to use it with the bluetooth in my truck occasionally.

Now I understand that most people.. for now... really don't use a huge amount of data, though that is changing with people watching Netflix, streaming music, and it seems that playing with Siri is eating up a ton of data on the iPhone. Looking at the AT&T support page right now, your only choices (other than whatever plan you are presently grandfathered in on) are a $20 plan for 300MB, or a $30 plan for 3GB; no brainer with that one. If you are a data hog and go over the 3GB on said plan, you don't get throttled, they just sell you an extra GB for $10 as needed. If you are pumping through 10GB of data like the previous poster, that's gonna be a whopping $100/mo for your data (ouch), but most of us don't use that much. I've been playing Pandora for hours several nights a week without regard for the data since I'm on the (previously) unlimited plan, but I could just easily switch to the wifi at work and be done with that data hog. However, if I wasn't able to, and I wanted to keep streaming so much, it would probably be in my best interest to switch to the tiered plan and buy an extra GB as needed.

I understand that there is only so much bandwidth for AT&T to dole out to customers. I use more data than the average user, and I don't have a problem paying a little extra for the data. And I don't think it's fair for someone who pays $30/mo for data and uses about 2GB/mo should have to pay the same amount as the guy who uses his rooted phone for his home internet provider and runs through 20GB+/mo; that really is just abusing the system. For the most part, I think the tiered plan is pretty fair, it comes down to $10/GB, minimum 3GB. I do think that power users should have something else available for them (maybe $50 or $60 gets you 10GB?), but at the moment, you have to use a pretty good bit of data to hit the 3GB mark. Problem is, that's gonna be changing over the next few years; a regular user will be using possibly up to 50GB/mo a few years from now, and people are gonna howl if they have to pay $500 for it. They up the speeds and the stuff that uses data, they are going to have to adjust the pricing accordingly. Kinda along the same lines at computer parts; think about how much 1TB of hard drives would have cost a few years ago. Now it's sub $100.

One thing that might help is the talk about letting providers pay for the bandwidth through their apps. For example, say you use 4GB/mo streaming Netflix; Netflix would pay for that bandwith in an agreement with AT&T, and that data would not be reflected in your data usage. Of course, that will bring about new fees for mobile usage, like Spotify and SiriusXM do for using their services on mobile devices.