Heavy data users may soon find themselves paying more for service if they're AT&T customers. AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega reiterated the company's idea to charge heavy network users more for their activities at the UBS conference on Wednesday, noting that a mere three percent of smartphone users suck up some 40 percent of the company's traffic. For those of us who are constantly tortured subjected to AT&T's slow service, this may seem like a great idea, but de la Vega's threat falls into the same trap that other ISPs have used in order to merely profit more from heavy users.

That tiny percentage of customers, which de la Vega pointed out were mostly iPhone users, are using a disproportionate amount of the company's bandwidth thanks to their heavy use of video, audio, and images. The company claims that perhaps these users aren't aware of what kind of effect they're having on the network and could use some "education" on the matter.

"The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data," de la Vega said, noting that AT&T was planning to offer realtime data usage to customers sometime in the future. "Longer term, there's got to be some sort of pricing scheme that addresses the users."

This isn't the first time de la Vega has talked about cracking down on heavy users. At the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2009 conference in October, he hinted at the same thing, repeatedly suggesting that net neutrality regulation would let a few heavy data users "crowd out the many" on its 3G data networks. At that time, he didn't specifically address pricing, but it was certainly no secret that the company was trying to find some way to help balance the load.

The problem with this approach is that some believe it's just a money grab instead of an attempt to really unclog the network. Yankee Group analyst Benoit Felten recently asserted that the concept of the "bandwidth hog" doesn't really exist and that ISPs really have no idea if heavy users are causing any sort of congestion. Instead, they just measure total data per user and wave around the heavy users on a flag as an excuse to muddle with pricing.

Whether or not that's true of AT&T is hard to say (Felten was specifically talking about wireline services in his comments, not wireless). Either way, though, AT&T is a victim of its own success thanks to the iPhone. The company willfully signed a multiyear agreement to be the sole provider of the popular device, which is credited with attracting a large number of new subscribers to AT&T. With it came an explosion in data usage thanks not only to easy access to the "real" Internet, but plenty of fun apps that give iPhone users access to rich media. Is this a case of AT&T not realizing what it got itself into? And if so, should heavy users have to pay an extra price for short-sightedness?

Do you think it's fair for the heaviest users to pay more for service?(poll)