AT&T has agreed to settle a lawsuit over the company’s DSL speeds — or more specifically the DSL speeds many users didn’t get. The class action in question was filed last year, and accuses AT&T of “breaching its contracts with and defrauding some of its customers” by imposing speed limits on their DSL tiers well below the advertised speed. As part of the settlement (pdf) AT&T agrees to no wrong doing, and will pay a maximum of $100 million — depending on the total number of class action participants. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the attorney unsurprisingly gets the biggest reward:

Any AT&T DSL customer who signed up for service after March 31, 1994 is qualified to apply for cash rewards, though again — only customers who had their DSL line capped at a speed lower than their advertised price will see any significant reward (perhaps a few hundred bucks). Many AT&T DSL customers can get $2 just for being unhappy with their speed for apparently any reason.

Many users sign up for a faster speed and AT&T caps users at a slower speed — should they find that the user’s copper loop length is too great or there’s a problem with the quality of the line itself. Since that’s hard to predict, most operators use the murky “up to” qualifier in ads as a loophole for potentially slower service. Should a user sign up for a faster tier and wind up on a slower one — they should be informed of this and obviously should pay the lower price.

As part of the settlement, AT&T has agreed to monitor its customers for 12 months “to ensure they are consistently receiving the Internet speeds they are paying for.” Of course beyond the physical speed limitations of the hardware and line this isn’t always under AT&T’s control, making this kind of a false promise. There’s some odd bits at the end of the Journal Sentinel story, where the author confuses speed caps with monthly consumption caps, and an analyst from Parks Associates informs the paper that he’s “not really convinced it matters that much” if users see their advertised speeds.
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2. Cable ISPs Offered Fastest Speeds in 2011* – *At Least Among Largest ISPs, And Thanks to Slow DSL
3. AT&T to refund customers for slow DSL data rates
4. After Lawsuit, Verizon to Modify FiOS Ads Slightly – Still Argues That Cablevision Under Delivers Bandwidth
5. 4 Out Of 5 In U.S. Don’t Know Their Broadband Speeds – …And 91% are satisfied by the speeds they don’t know they have….

Tags: amp, copper loop, dsl customer, dsl speeds, lawsuit, Milwaukee, milwaukee journal sentinel, Ohio, service, settlement, speed, T DSL

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