LulzSec, the anti-sec group that quickly rose to Internet infamy over the past month or so, has just as quickly disbanded and disappeared back into the ether -- but not without one last data dump. And buried inside the 450-or-so megabytes is a folder labeled "AT&T internal data." And inside that folder is a massive dump of AT&T's plans, memos, timelines and other sundries regarding its LTE rollout.
Most of the documents are highly technical and are obviously pointed at engineers, talking about the back-end stuff that we never see -- and that most of us have no chance of actually understanding. And the documents themselves are pretty old in the scheme of things, from late 2010 to early 2011. So keep in mind that anything you read in there likely isn't up to date, was never intended for public consumption, and is very likely to change.
But one interesting tidbit is AT&T's apparent plan to market LTE data with various speed tiers, which it's calling "Speed Based Pricing." Verizon's about to switch to tiered pricing for its data plans (3G and 4G), but that's based on total consumption, not speed. The basic idea would be pay more, and you get faster LTE speeds. Not exactly a new premise -- cable companies have been doing this for Internet access for a while now, but it'd be an interesting change in the mobile space.
And then there's "Session Based Pricing," or the option for faster data speeds when you need them (that's the "per session"), even if you're a slower plan. Interesting stuff, actually.
Now, all that said: Something we haven't seen in the leaks are any specific smartphone plans. Nor are there any juicy pictures of upcoming phones and anything. In fact, it could well be that the speed-based pricing will be geared toward laptop-type data and not for smartphones. Will there be a difference between that and smartphones? Dunno. Point is, we're looking at this as an interesting look into what we might eventually see if and when AT&T's LTE network is up and running -- and not as anything written in stone.
Source: LulzSec
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