said by rradina:So at least for you, is it fair to say that regardless of the technical description of what AT&T does, throttling==service interruption?
Pretty much but its in general. 56 kbps on a smartphone is god awful, a lot of apps that need the internet either won't work or take longer than most are willing to wait to load up. Actually during speedtesting the best I was able to pull was about 48 kbps and unthrottled I see up to and beyond 6mbps on my 3G phone.
EDIT: also most of the data used was from the market like updating apps, maybe uploading a backup of the phones data with maybe 1 or 2 downloads of something of a good size.