You don't see evidence? Are you kidding? The evidence couldn't be anymore obvious than it has been...first piece of EVIDENCE is the blatant fact that they got rid of the unlimited data plan in the first place, second piece of evidence are the warnings to people who are on unlimited data plans that have been "grandfathered" in, basically telling them that they know they are using tethering outside of AT&T's own offerings, and they are giving them the information so they can switch over to the legitimate tethering plan with AT&T.
THIRD piece of evidence is the data throttling that begins this fall...they never ONCE said that they would only be throttling this 5% number you keep bringing up, they officially said two things...that there were a number of "heavy users" (that by numeric reference equalled up to about 5%) that were causing concern and hogging up data network speeds...THEN they said the throttling would only effect the unlimited data plan customers that they considered "heavy users", it never specifically pointed out 5% anywhere, it simply said heavy users...
So using deductive observation, one can see a trend here...right now the heavy users are that magic number "5%", so what about after the throttling occurs and that group is eliminated? Then what is the defined parameters of "heavy user"? Oh, that's right...there isn't one...there wasn't one before either, the 5% group was something that was figured up based on the number of users that AT&T was saying was using 12x the normal data usage of the network average.
And i point out again...you have an abrupt end to the unlimited data plan, then you have warnings and requests to users within that plan to switch over to AT&T's tiered plan...THEN you have data throttling.
Look man, i don't know about you, but it's kind of hard to ignore EVIDENCE like this when it's slapping you in the face. They are preparing the network for the elimination of unlimited data plans, period...there would be no reason for them to go through all these steps for any other reason BUT that, zero...none...they could simply throttle users behind the scenes like other companies do, and no one would be the wiser.
As far as the LTE thing...where did i say anything about AT&T not working on it? I said there wasn't any real information about their LTE network out there, so your comment before about it helping with data usage was a moot point because there was no information AT ALL to base such ideas on.
Im not quite sure why you're confused with my usage of the term "recent" either, the entire conversation i've used the word to reference the time in which data usage became an issue...i haven't changed that stance, so what is confusing?