AT&T has made it no secret they are short on spectrum.

In response to their spe ctrum shortage AT&T has made a number of changes. Theyve changed their data plan offerings and have even instituted the throttling of data speeds on unlimited c ustomers once they hit a certain point of data usage. However, there is one cha nge AT&T made that they didnt tell you about. AT&T is now throttling all smartph one customers data speeds during phone calls. It doesnt matter what rate plan you are on, when you are on a phone call, your data speeds will be throttled by the network. When on a call AT&T slows your data down to approximately 800k-1meg o n the download, and a virtually unusable 20-24k on the upload. We decided to do a series of tests to see where the data speed management was co ming from. We wanted to know if it was being done on the device level or on the network level. To test this we used an international GSM Unlocked Galaxy Nexus . When we put a T-Mobile sim card in the phone we got pretty good data speeds a t 5.5Mbps download and 2.8Mbps upload when not on a call. When on a call, we di dnt see much change in the data speeds as we pulled 4.7Mbps download and 1.7Mbps upload. When we tried the same thing with an AT&T sim card in the same phone, t he in-call throttling was quite ostensible. We went from 4.5Mbps download and 1 .1Mbps upload off-call, to 1.0Mbps download and .024 (24k)Mbps upload. This was using the same phone in the same location, but the only difference being we use d an AT&T sim card instead of T-Mobile. We repeated this same test in several d ifferent high signal locations and got the same type of results every time. We then spread the test across several other AT&T devices to see if the throttli ng was device specific. We found the device you use does not matter (since the throttling is being done at the network level). We tested the Galaxy Note, Pant ech Burst, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, Motorola Atrix, Motorola Atrix 2, Galaxy S2, Gal axy S2 SkyRocket, and several other AT&T smartphones and still got the same resu lts. We tried the test with different sim cards for different accounts, we trie d different locations, and we still always wound up with the same results, in-ca ll throttling. We are not sure exactly when AT&T started with the in-call throttling. We start ed to notice the difference in in-call speed almost a year ago. There was a poi nt in time that using the phone while still on a call barely made a difference i n data speeds. A person could surf the web, download apps, send picture message s, upload pictures to Facebook, and other data related activities and not have a problem. Now trying to upload a picture to Facebook during a call is almost im possible, due to the ridiculously slow upload speeds (24k) youre throttled to whi le on a call. Trying to download apps takes much longer than it should, due to the slowed down data speeds. Web browsing while on a call is frustratingly slow . All in all, its gotten to a point that unless youre on wifi, its probably best n ot to use data at all during a call. The results of our tests clearly show that AT&T is throttling customers data spee ds during calls. No matter what device you use or how fast of a data connection you have at the time, when you get on a call your speeds wind up almost the sam e. That fact clearly shows this is due to throttling. Just look at the upload speeds. There is no explanation for your upload speed going from over 1Mbps, do wn to .024Mbps just because youre on a call. For those that dont understand what that means, it means you went from a speed of 1,000 down to 24. To put it in pe rspective, dial-up internet has a 56k connection. On the download side of thing s, it doesnt matter if you have a 2Mbps connection or a 6Mbps connection, if you get on a call your data speed is going to go down to around 1Mbps. It doesnt mat ter how good of a signal you have, it doesnt matter what phone you use, it doesnt matter what plan youre on, because in the end AT&T is going to secretly throttle you when youre on a call. http://thesmartphonechamp.com/att-secretly-throttling-their-smartphone-customers -video/