Now if you’re currently using AT&T, you won’t see sudden cutoffs on your data where it will stop working, rather, AT&T is attempting to rein in “excessive” data use by  forcing customers to pay premiums for high usage or optimal quality of service.  It seems that 3% of their smartphone customers currently chew up 40% of their network capacity.

According to a Rethink-Wireless Article, Ralph de la Vega, AT&T’s head of wireless indicated “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,” he said, though he was short on actual details of how this would be achieved.

What this will do is create two areas for the consumer to be concerned with:

1.  Learn what applications are the bandwidth hogs and mitigate your current usage

2.  Application developers will have to re-write applications and design future apps to be more conservative with data usage.

AT&T is not the only mobile carrier concerned with customer usage of it’s data services.  Sprint/Nextel CEO Dan Hesse commented at its investor conference: “When you think about postpaid …. it’s not just going to be your phone. It’s going to be your camera, your iTouch, your gaming device – they’re all going to become wireless, so what’s going to be the right plan for those? As we move into 4G, it’ll be much less about minutes and more about gigabytes as the main driver of what customers are buying per month, because it’s going to be VoIP oriented. Minutes will be largely irrelevant.”

Regardless, the future of wireless is about to change and for some, it’s dramatic change.  If you thought a flat-rated plan was your answer to leveling your wireless costs- guess what?  It’s only about to get more complicated.