Hasta La Gadget!

An AT&T executive said Wednesday that the carrier is planning to tighten data usage controls for heavy smartphone users, according to USA Today.

It’s no secret that carrier networks are fragile beasts. Thanks to AT&T’s excruciatingly slow 3G build-out and the wildly successful iPhone, it’s probably the worst off of the four carriers in this regard. But even as AT&T struggles to catch up with network upgrades, head of consumer services Ralph de la Vega told investors in New York that it’s planning “incentives” to get high-bandwidth users to cool it, the report said.

This probably has something to do with how data card subscribers (at $59.99 per month) have a 5GB cap, whereas right now smartphone users don’t. De La Vega said that just three percent of smartphone users are eating up 40 percent of available capacity, and that most of it is thanks to high-bandwidth video streaming apps.

“We need to educate the customer … We’ve got to get them to
understand what represents a megabyte of data,” de la Vega said in the report. If that’s the case, rather than blaming his customers, he should probably have a talk with Apple–which is currently featuring CNN‘s video-heavy mobile app as “Pick of the Week.”