T-Mobile to begin throttling data usage over 5GB beginning October 16?

by Tyler Cunningham
tagged 5GB, data, data throttling, T-Mobile

Back in April, T-Mobile was the only wireless provider toying with the idea of throttling data instead of capping it, meaning that instead of cutting customers off at a certain point, speeds would simply be reduced to offset what T-Mobile would call excessive use of data.

It was thought that this was going to happen then, but a new internal document brought to us by TmoNews appears to reveal that the throttling switch is being flipped this Saturday, October 16, once a user hits a threshold of 5GB. In all honesty, this seems like a pretty reasonable alternative to capping data usage, especially at 5 GB. As T-Mobile puts it, 5GB is equivalent to about 125,000 page visits of Yahoo.com, and only 1% of customers will ever experience throttling.

I for one would love to see other carriers go this route, and perhaps if T-Mobile leads by example, they just might follow suit.

[via Engadget]

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Categorized as Android Carriers

Comments

curse

That’s how the carriers in Sweden have done for years, after some limit they lower the speed to “modem speed”. Depending on your subscription you can have 1GB, 3GB, 5GB, 10GB, 20GB and unlimited.
Redndeyes

That sucks. I pay $175 a month for two phones to be fully unlimited. 10gb was fair enough but still bullshit in my opinion. I think they should have to wait till a new contract was signed to make changes to ones speed throttling. I just don’t get it its not like they arent getting paid. I pay too much to be throttled 5-10gb. I have a mytouch and I’m always browsing and online gaming, within 9 days of my billing cycles end I always get the txt from tmo telling me I’m being throttled and that was @ 10gb. If this is true it really blows!
Howie_in_AZ

I wonder if one could use this to avoid the early termination fee as it’s a change to the underlying contract…
curse

Howie – hopefully, but they probably have some hidden “we can change bla, bla and bla without bla” somewhere..

Throttling is totally ok if that is what you got a subscription with, but got from unlimited to throttled for the same money really is the sucks.

If I pay for unlimited, I should be able to use max bandwidth the phone/subscription support 24/7. If not, it’s not unlimited.
WhackAMole

I wish my carrier would try this with our unlimited data plans. It would only be a matter of a few weeks before someone filed a class action against them for false advertising or some other type of fraud. They can’t sell you an unlimited plan and then tell you they’re gonna throttle you at 5GB. No court in the land would rule in their favor on this, at least not as it pertains to “unlimited” data subscribers.