AT&T’s new tiered pricing plan that charges customers for the amount of data they consume has application development pros worried that people will stop downloading bandwidth-intensive apps. Noam Bardin, chief executive of app developer Waze, notes, “If people start thinking about how big a file is, or how fast an application is refreshing, that will be a huge inhibitor.”
While AT&T says that only 2 percent of its customers use more than 2 GB, the limit on its new $25 per month plan, new features of the iPhone and iPad seem designed to encourage more data consumption. Watching video, making video calls, streaming music and multi-tasking can make data consumption add up pretty fast.
Some believe that the new data caps will cause developers to scale back on new features that might require a lot of bandwidth.
