Once upon a time, people began surfing the Internet while on the go. This trend gained the nickname, “Mobile Computing.” As mobile computing gained exposure and popularity, developers and businesses began tailoring programmes and apps toward the mobile phone crowd. As the smartphone crowd grew, service providers offered better plans in their data buckets – gigabytes instead of megabytes. Then, the GB figures grew too high, and the providers began selling unlimited plans with restrictions. Now, they are seemingly penalizing users for taking advantage of their restricted unlimited plan. It’s called

“throttling back.”

Last year, service providers did, almost across the board, issue change alerts to their new data plans: Please keep streaming actions to your home PC. Data servers were becoming bogged and clogged. Some service providers escalated their over-limit charges and billed over-users a considerable sum of money for ever byte of bandwidth over the plan guidelines.

That still didn’t stop users from streaming, checking email or playing online games – at least it didn’t stop enough of them for AT&T.

Last year, AT&T began sending text messages to the top five percent of data users. A transcript of the message reads,

“ATT Msg: Your data use this month places you in the top 5% of users. Use WiFi to help avoid reduced speeds.”

The message then gave them a URL to visit or a phone number to call.

Hundreds of users who say they received this message stated they weren’t even close to their data limit, and some stated their billing cycle had just started.

AT&T allowed some users to grandfather their old unlimited data plan into an upgraded phone purchase and new contract. Then AT&T then sent them the message and forced slower speeds onto the users’ phones.

AT&T isn’t the only carrier cutting back on data usage, even if contracted as truly unlimited – not unlimited with restriction until the carrier cuts back even further.

Verizon joined AT&T in a

“drip-casting”

plan: If a data user knows he wants to watch a particular TV show or film on a smartphone, he can schedule it with the carrier. The carrier would then choose a non-peak time between the notice and the scheduled time to pre-download the stream and store it for the user. The incentive bonus to the programme is that pre-scheduled data use would not be debited from the user’s data plan.

Industry observers ponder if TiVo will review the process for possible patent violations or whether the plan is simply a prelude to a ‘Big Brother’ oversight on allowed Internet access. Or “other,” of course.

Sprint seems to be taunting the Big Two on data plan restrictions, asking users if they would switch to Sprint if they could get a truly unlimited data plan with an iPhone 5. Sprint, of course, is simultaneously advertising their sole vendor status for that next-gen iPhone.