According to a recent report communications giant AT&T is considering encouraging users to cut their data usage on iPhones through the introduction of incentives.
The popularity of the Apple iPhone means that many users in the United States are using large amounts of wireless data, and this is affecting the network because they are using so much of the network capacity. According to reports AT&T said that three percent of smart phone users are taking up around forty percent of the network capacity, and the company is now looking at introducing incentives to encourage those people to use less data.
Ralph de la Vega, AT&T’s head of wireless, was speaking at a recent conference when he stated that the company was thinking about using incentives to try and get iPhone users to reduce the amount of data that they were using so that the impact on the network capacity was not quite so damaging.
At the conference he stated: “We’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage so they don’t crowd out the other customers in those same cell sites. And you’ll see us address that more in detail.”
He also stated: “What’s driving usage on the network and driving these high usage situations are things like video, or audio that keeps playing around the clock. And so we’ve got to get to those customers and have them recognize that they need to change their pattern, or there will be other things that they are going to have to do to reduce their usage.”
Source – Cnet