T-Mobile caps smartphone users' data at 500 MB/month

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/windows-watch/2011/01/so-apparently-t-mobile-hates-its-customers/index.htm

by dreemteem • 16 years ago

52 65 16 years ago

blogs.computerworlduk.com

Can someone explain to me how "unlimited usage" plans are even allowed to have a cap at all. I've never understood why this is legal.

Surely you shouldn't be allowed to advertise something as "unlimited" and then impose a limit in the small print. Is there a reason why this common activity is permitted at all?

jvdh• 16 years ago

Simple, every mention of "unlimited" in their advertisements or contracts will have a footnote saying that it is actually capped by an AUP with a cap on it.

Like the author said, operators and users have a different definition of "unlimited". Problem is, operators put theirs in the contract that their users have signed.

SimonPStevens4• 16 years ago

>"every mention of "unlimited" in their advertisements or contracts will have a footnote saying that it is actually capped"

So you are saying it's OK because they correct it in the footnotes?

By that logic they could also offer "500 minutes & 500 texts... Footnote: actually, it's capped at 10".

What I don't understand is how they can advertise with a word with a crystal clear meaning like unlimited and then totally go against that just because they include a footnote that contradicts their main content.

If you are allowed to contradict your self in the footnotes surely there'd be all kinds of strange adverts:

"X petrol provides unlimited mpg....actually just 35mpg" "Y chocolate with zero fat...actually, 98g of fat per 100g" "Z magazine with unlimited pages...really only 10"

I thought advertisements were not allowed to be misleading, and a can't see how claiming unlimited but then capping is not misleading.

There must be some legal precedent or loophole somewhere that permits this "unlimited" fakery or surely they would have been stopped by now.

farzadb82• 16 years ago

They typically define "unlimited" as being 24/7 availability.

That is "unlimited usage" implies that you can use their system at anytime 24/7 not that you can use it for an unlimited period of time.

mikegreenberg• 16 years ago

I understood that "unlimited" meant all you can eat with a biggest pipe we can offer you for the first X Gb, and then we throttle "over the cap" usage for the rest of the billing cycle. Technically, you can keep using it, but at reduced speeds.

SimonPStevens4• 16 years ago

Makes sense.

But in a slightly different domain, my broadband provider advertises "Unlimited XMbps broadband" but throttles after 1.5Gb. That's clearly not "Unlimited XMb/s" That's "1.5Gb XMb/s broadband with unlimited 300Kbps broadband". Yeah I know broadband speed is a big grey area, and they have all these getout clauses like service conditions etc etc, but when it comes right down to it the whole thing just feels like a advertising con.

dspillett• 16 years ago

I don't know about other territories, but in the UK this has been tested in court for ADSL providers.

The claim there is that you have unlimited access where access is defined by time (unlimited being 24/7/365.25) rather than unlimited bandwidth to use in that unlimited time. To back this up as a valid argument, it was pointed out that back when dial-up was king most providers (even those with only expensive per-minute access plans) had limits on how long you could be connected in one session and in total in a given day (this was to reduce the number of incoming lines and modem devices they needed to provide the service). So in this sense "unlimited" would be better termed "always available" or "always on".

Of course this isn't how they advertise the service, the adverts very distinctly imply (but are very careful never to actually state) that unlimited means bandwidth as they talk on end about downloading and streaming and show the happy people in ad-land watching HD content with reckless abandon.

A grey area still not tested to my knowledge is providers who have changed what the work unlimited means where it previously did explicitly mean unlimited bandwidth (when they were naive enough to think people would not find a use for enough to cause a problem).

One legal recourse t-mobile users may have in this case is if their plan previously explicitly stated a cap or fair-use policy higher than the 500MB. If you plan has gone from 3GB to 0.5MB then you probably have a case for demanding you keep the 3Gb until the end of the contracted period or to have your contract terminated early at no cost to you. Of course your original agreement may have weasel words like "unlimited with fair use policy, _currently_ set as 3GB/month", which would give them a get-out clause.

teilo• 16 years ago

This is UK-only at present it seems, but I have to think it's coming to the USA soon enough.

Yet another reason to switch to Verizon next month. Yeah, not a lot better, but they'll have the iPhone at least, with personal hotspot (just like my Nexus One).

stanleydrew• 16 years ago

But, unlike with your Nexus One, it will cost you $20+ per month to use your personal hotspot.

rbranson• 16 years ago

I doubt it'll head to the US. You have to understand the difference between the UK and US markets. T-Mobile is a dominant player in the UK market, while they've only managed to grab roughly 10% of the US mobile market. T-Mobile's HSPA network is underutilized here and the last thing they need is a PR mess like this.

kilian• 16 years ago

Here in the Netherlands, "unlimited" data transfer remains T-mobile's only competitive advantage over other carriers now carrying the iPhone. I hope they will keep this in mind for a long time to come.

eps• 16 years ago

> downloading files, streaming music and watching videos should be done on your home broadband. You know, those things that people bought their shiny new iPhone or Android handset specifically to do.

I am one of these people and I do not download files, stream music or watch videos on the iPhone. I do use it extensively including the Internet browsing over 3G and never had my monthly usage go over few hundred megs.

Being a busy adult I also suspect that I am actually in the majority here. Just sayin'

anonymous246• 16 years ago

Huh, whoever downvoted the above comment care to explain why you did that?

khafra• 16 years ago

The Pandora app is great if, like me, you don't have satellite radio in your car and sometimes don't enjoy whatever's on NPR. If you have a specific song you want to play for someone, youtube is indispensible.

potatolicious2• 16 years ago

Heaven forbid that people use their phones to do multimedia things! Who needs advances like being able to catch up on TV news while on your way to work, or using a smart DJ service like Pandora? Or even sneaking in last night's episode of [insert show here] on a particularly long commute?

Pshaw, clearly all of that is just for bored teenagers. No reasonably effective, busy adult would have use for anything but HTML and email!

Sorry for the snarky tone, but your implication that busy adults have no need for all of these data-intensive apps is somewhat insulting.

ZoFreX5• 16 years ago

There is a lot of FUD flying around over this issue. Hopefully I can dispel some of it.

Firstly, it's a fair usage policy, not a hard limit. You don't get charged for over-use with a FUP. With my contract (which is with Orange), if I go over the FUP a little bit, nothing happens. If I take the piss then they will ask me to upgrade to a larger data package, or use less, or lose it.

Secondly, the "T-Mobile says no videos or downloads on your mobile" idea isn't entirely correct. If you hit the 500MB limit in a month, your internet continues to work on your phone! However, streaming video and other data heavy activities will not work once you are past the limit.

Lastly, it's really, really hard to use 3GB of data on a mobile phone. I have 3G watchdog installed on my Droid and the only time I've come close to 500MB is when I was tethering. 500MB doesn't sound like a lot these days, but on a mobile phone it really is plenty. My usage over the last 6 complete months is as follows: 295, 316, 388, 166, 407, 211 (all figures in megabytes) and I use my phone pretty heavily. YMMV of course.

However, I would understand anyone being upset by these changes. I hope Ofcom finds in the consumers' favour and the change is repealed, or people are allowed to get out of their contracts early with no penalty. The way T-Mobile has handled this, from the "announcement" (or lack thereof), to telling people what their smartphones are and aren't for, is a lesson in how not to do things.

mbreese• 16 years ago

> your internet continues to work on your phone

> streaming video and other data heavy activities will not work

I fail to see how those two things can both be true.

ZoFreX5• 16 years ago

I know for sure that transmission of HTML and images etc (i.e. most of what you need for webpages) and email continue to work when you hit the limit.

omh2• 16 years ago

Lastly, it's really, really hard to use 3GB of data on a mobile phone

I've just been looking at an upgrade and found that I've been using about 1GB a month. This is mainly through streaming radio as I travel to work, and if my commute was longer (or it wasn't half underground!) I could easily use 2-3GB on radio alone.

Incidentally, I used to use FM radio for this but since I got an iPhone this isn't an option!

ZoFreX5• 16 years ago

Using Spotify every day is one of the biggest factors in my usage, but I never got over 500MB. Can you get Spotify on iPhone? One of the big bandwidth savers is that you can download your playlists to your phone, so the songs only have to be downloaded once (You can cache up to ~3000 songs like this). You can set it to only sync when on wifi, so you'll have all your songs when you're out and about (and underground!) without using so much of your 3G bandwidth.

steveklabnik5• 16 years ago

My girlfriend used 3GB of mobile data a month or two ago. She listens to a lot of Pandora.

Your experiences are not able to be extrapolated to another chunk of the population.

ZoFreX5• 16 years ago

I said it was hard because I was thrashing it. In one of those months, I left Windows Update running while my phone was tethered. During the summer, I was using Spotify every day, on the walk to work and on the walk home again. Even under such heavy usage I didn't get close, I think a very small percentage of people use more than half a gig (which begs the question, why bother limiting it in the first place if most people don't touch it?)

daimyoyo• 16 years ago

I'm probably not a typical user, but I average 10GB per month on my phone. So being able to use non-throttled data for 2 days doesn't seem like an attractive offer to me. That said, if AT&T forces me to go onto a tiered plan(I still have the unlimited now) then I'll be looking for a new phone company.

mortice• 16 years ago

I'd be upset, but T-Mobile failed to get an upgrade smartphone to me within 2 months of my order and so I switched to Vodafone and got it within 3 days.

Full story, for the interested:

I had recently moved home and tried to use T-Mobile's website to update my address. Unfortunately, it had one of those forms which require you to enter a postal code and select the correct address from the results of a postal code lookup, with no way to manually correct it. Since the postal code lookup didn't give my address, I chose to call T-Mobile's customer service number to get the address changed at the same time as asking for an upgrade.

I spoke to one customer service representative to update the address, confirming very clearly that they had the correct address, and then asked to be put through to the upgrades department. After negotiating the upgrade, I asked whether it would be dispatched to the new address I had just given them and was assured that it would, within the next week.

A week and a half later, the phone had not arrived and I hadn't heard anything, so I called again to find out the status of the order, and was told that the phone had been dispatched to a non-existent address as that was what T-Mobile had on file for me. In fact, it was the incorrect address suggested by the postal code lookup service which I had specifically called to have corrected. Note also that T-Mobile had on record that the phone could not be delivered and neglected to contact me.

After updating my records (finally) to the correct address, T-Mobile told me they couldn't send out another phone as stock was limited and that they couldn't simply send the erroneously sent handset to the correct address once it returned to them because that "wasn't how their system worked".

Another month of going round in circles with inept customer support reps and I was gone. Next time I won't be so patient.

maeon3• 16 years ago

Already they are chipping away at net nutrality by sniffing around what you are doing on THEIR Internet. They are becoming gate-keepers for what kinds of content can pass through their shiny gates.

It is only a matter of time until this turns into finer and finer gradient of what applications/features/utilities you can and can't use at any given time.

JoeAltmaier2• 16 years ago

Wireless limits have to be hit some day. Each tower supports one bandwidth-worth of traffic no matter how many users are in that area. Imagine a wired network with hundreds of people on one switch.

Of course they are handling it badly. But its not the case that they have any simple recourse - a successful ad campaign resulted in oversubscribed bandwidth. They can install more towers - lag time: months or years to get the right-of-way. They can improve cacheing etc on their end. And they can get folks to use it less.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

They will have to buy it from some other company then: if they don't have the bandwith, they shouldn't sell it.

jonhohle3• 16 years ago

Not only that, but more users for them means more money to buy hardware and upstream bandwidth and hopefully some profit. That's the reason people are paying them.

Perhaps telecom is different than most markets, but more users generally drives costs down, not up.

eftpotrm2• 16 years ago

Another customer who's fed up with this. I went with T-Mobile just over a month ago knowing they had other limitations - worse coverage and slower data rates - specifically because they had good data terms. Now this isn't true, and I _will_ be kicking up a fuss about this in the effort to get either this rescinded or my contract cancelled without penalty (for which I'm quite happy to return the phone provided under it).

T-Mobile, a thought experiment for you. You've decided you only want to provide me with half of a key service that you agreed to when I agreed to the contract. How about I reciprocate and only want to provide you with half of the payment I said I would? Would that be OK too?

mike-cardwell4• 16 years ago

In the places I travel to in the Midlands and Lincolnshire, I've always found T-Mobile to have the best 3G network. In comparison to O2, Vodafone and Orange anyway.

I'm on T-Mobile PAYG and I currently buy a £20 booster once every 6 months which gives me 1GB of data per month. So effectively £3.33/month for 1GB of data. Which I thought was brilliant. I wont be happy if this drops to 500MB (although it's not obvious it will), but it's still a pretty good deal relative to other networks...

steveklabnik5• 16 years ago

This is why we don't have nice things.

"I mean, I'm still getting _less_ screwed than with everyone else" is the reality of the situation, but that doesn't make it good. Or right.

eftpotrm2• 16 years ago

Interesting, the wording when I was reading up on all this was that data on PAYG was still being bought monthly. If I'd known that sort of deal was available I might well have gone for it - I'm already carrying a netbook most of the time so the need for a smartphone as well isn't enormous, if the data can be had separately so cheaply.... Oh well.

Overall though, I've not been so impressed by the data network. Slower than one might hope and too many odd times when it's claiming 3G signal but sites simply aren't responding with usable speed. Primary usage further south than you in Beds/Bucks but with some in Derbyshire too.

patrickgzill• 16 years ago

If you signed a contract under the old rates/limits, then those should still apply regardless of any new changes.

I would call T-Mobile and have a conversation with them; they cannot unilaterally change the terms of a written contract.

peteri• 16 years ago

This could be a monster screwup, my phone contract has 1GB data limit, for an extra 5GBP (7.5USD) per month I get boosted upto 3GB, the ability to officially use my phone for tethering and a proper HSDPA+ data rate. Since I go off site and work in Police facilities where the odds of me being able to connect to their network is NIL this is an important feature for me.

Apparently (this is unconfirmed properly) I may well find the FUP limit for me being dropped to either 1GB or 500MB depending on who you ask. While most months I don't get near to the FUP if I'm doing a lot of work onsite then it's likely I'll bust 500MB but I can't see 1GB being all that likely. TMobile FUP isn't too bad as when you break it they don't hit you with excess data fees but I'm hacked off with this and will move when my contract is up in April (It doesn't seem worth the hassle of arguing) For folks with an Android phone they were forced to get the 3GB upgrade which was by far the most generous of the UK networks recently. Most networks previously have grandfathered you until the expiry of your contract (or you renew) which is at least fair.

It's not entirely obvious if this means that tmobile have accidently broken the contract with a lot of android phone owners who can now walk away from tmobile and get a cheaper deal elsewhere (I happen to think yes). I've had no notification yet of this change so I wonder if it's been put on hold while the lawyers rethink it.

mike-cardwell4• 16 years ago

No contract has been broken because existing contracts aren't affected: http://support.t-mobile.co.uk/help-and-support/index?page=ho...

mike-cardwell4• 16 years ago

http://support.t-mobile.co.uk/help-and-support/index?page=ho...

"There will be no change to the data packages for existing customers for the duration of their contract"

This is for new users only or people upgrading. It doesn't affect existing contracts.

salvadors• 16 years ago

The original change was for existing contracts too. They've since backed off from that and now only apply it to new contracts.

steveklabnik5• 16 years ago

What about those of us who decided to go month-to-month, for example?

"The duration of their contract" means "you get to wait a little while before getting fucked."

duke_sam• 16 years ago

I'm surprised they are acting like this in the UK. There's a much better choice of carriers in Europe and you don't have any problems with different wireless standards (GSM vs CDMA).

I knew the choice in Ireland was pretty awful but I figured competition in the UK would keep dick moves like this in check.

halo• 16 years ago

The UK has the same amount of carriers/networks as the US: four. They do all use GSM, though.

stcredzero• 16 years ago

Here's what I've done:

    - Unlocked iPhone 
      (I bought a Canadian one, but you can also jailbreak.)
    - Clear 4G mobile hotspot

Between this and onsite WiFi, I have all the mobile broadband that I'd want.

After reading the article, I'm considering moving from my T-Mobile monthly service to AT&T GoPhone. I can buy minutes and megabytes for emergency use and maintain this for very little cost. (Which I'm free to do, since I've refused to have a contract.)

gst3• 16 years ago

500 MB is a joke.

I currently pay 4 Euros per GB per month. That's it - no other fees at all (meaning: I do not need to combine this with a voice plan, I get voice for 4 Eurocents per minute [or alternatively 9 euros for 1000 minutes], and I don't have any other fixed costs).

1 GB is more than enough for me, but there's also another plan that costs 9 Euros per months and gives you 9 GB (per month).

drivebyacct22• 16 years ago

4 Euros per GB per month

My mouth is agape. I would kill for a fair, per-GB smartphone plan here in the United States. $10/GB, no matter whether it's your phone, your tablet/netbook/laptop tethered to your phone, etc.

rue• 16 years ago

The U.S. prices really are ridiculous – what about Canada?

Also on the .eu side, I pay 13.90€/mo for an unlimited and uncapped dual-SIM data plan, i.e. phone and mobile broadband. The regular phone plan is an additional 0.66€/mo + 0.066€ per text or minute (I chose no package since I use those very little).

T-Mobile caps smartphone users' data at 500 MB/month

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