• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, August 14, 2015

Verizon has quietly reversed its 2011 decision to throttle some longtime wireless customers who still subscribe to unlimited data plans and use the 3G network.

The company recently notified people of the move via its Web site, which now says: "Beginning in 2011, to optimize our network, we managed data connection speeds for a small subset of customers -- those who are in the top 5% of data users and have 3G devices on unlimited data plans -- and only in places and at times when the network was experiencing high demand. We discontinued this practice in June, 2015."

Verizon's policy shift didn't draw attention until Thursday, when RCRWireless wrote about the move.

The carrier's decision came at around the same time the FCC proposed fining AT&T $100 million for allegedly failing to disclose its throttling policies.

A company spokesperson says Verizon discontinued the throttling program because it only affected "a small subset of customers."

Even though Verizon no longer offers unlimited data plans to new customers, the company allows longtime subscribers who already have unlimited data plans to keep them.

Verizon's latest move comes almost one year after the company backed away from a plan to throttle subscribers with unlimited data plans who use the newer 4G LTE network.

That plan would have involved slowing down 4G LTE customers who use more data than 95% of others, when the network was congested.

Verizon decided against implementing that policy after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler publicly criticized the company. “I know of no past Commission statement that would treat as 'reasonable network management' a decision to slow traffic to a user who has paid, after all, for 'unlimited' service,” he wrote to Verizon one year ago.

The advocacy group Public Knowledge also criticized Verizon last year, arguing that its statements about throttling don't adequately notify consumers about whether they're at risk of slowdowns.

"Without access to network information, it is impossible for subscribers to translate 'top 5%' into an actual data amount on their own,” Public Knowledge says," the group said in a letter to Verizon. “As with the 5% threshold, it is impossible for subscribers to know where those congested parts of the network might be."