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For those wondering what the term means:

"customers who use more than xxGB of data in a single billing cycle will have their data usage prioritized below other customers for the remainder of that billing cycle.
"When your data usage is deprioritized, you may see slower data speeds when you’re at a location where the network is congested. If you move away from this area to a less congested spot or if the location becomes less congested, your data speeds should return to normal."

Source: http://www.tmonews.com/2017/05...

Haven't you seen the projected t-mobile coverage at the end of 2017 map? http://www.tmonews.com/2017/02... It looks to me that USCC and T-mobile are going to be LTE roaming partners soon. The USCC Wisconsin half-state line is quite distinct.

T-mobile just deprioritizes users that went over a certain amount of data compared to the rest of the users. This way service for these other users is not degraded. But if the network has spare capacity? Knock yourself out!

They also throttle you to slower speed rather than charging overages if you exceed your cap on a limited plan. So you can still check your e-mail/facebook till you get to WiFi or pay/wait for more data.

Disconnecting is drastic and customer hostile. What if you just have a buggy app that keeps using data?

T-Mobile sheds some light on YouTube’s absence from Binge On

Even T-Mobile says he's wrong.

http://www.tmonews.com/2015/02...

when I'm going to be paying for a carrier contract anyway

Because the math has changed recently and pre-pay is now cheaper than post-pay, unless you have some special use case. The only network where you can use your "free" 5C is on Sprint.

Wrong;

AT&T: http://www.att.com/wireless/iphone/#fbid=Z0dbgc1cUkn
T-Mobile: http://www.tmonews.com/2013/09/t-mobile-stores-to-open-at-8am-local-time-friday-for-iphone-5s5c-launch/

As of last Friday. Verizon has offered to match this, but has yet to update their pre-order website, which requires $99 or a monthly bill roll-in to cover the $99.

But yes, you are correct that the US model economics differ from the European model. The US model is to sell you a two year contract, give you a "free" phone, and then dangle a new "free" phone 6 months before the 2 year contract is up in order to get you to re-up for another 2 year contract.

This is one of the reasons none of the U.S. carriers are interested in pushing Android updates: if you get the most recent Android OS without the new phone they are dangling in front of you, what's your incentive to not go month-to-month? If the carriers have no incentive to push an update, then the device manufacturers have no incentive to even develop the update in the first place, and so you have this multitude of Android phones with a multitude of versions and a multitude of vendor specific porting changes to get it to run on the device. Hence no standard application market for Android, like the Apple App Store, and the smaller vendor markets and Google's market never get more than a fraction of the number of applications you see in the App Store.

Also US consumers are generally not pre-pay for anything: everything is about buying on credit. This goes for phones, but it also goes for mid ticket items which Europeans save up for then buy outright, like cars. Europeans grudgingly do the mortgage thing on houses.

If you are buying the iPhone outright to avoid the carrier entanglements: good for you, but in that case, unless you plan to live without Apps, iPhones are not a fungible commodity, or you'd be buying a fire sale Win8 phone from a doomed vendor, like the Nokia Lumia. So you aren't price sensitive at that point, you're just kvetching that the rest of the industry won't change its business model to suit the way you personally, as an insignificant fraction of their market, like to buy things. In fact, I would have to say that their target market doesn't include you at all, since their target market is "people who pay more than they have to when all costs are amortized and totaled because of carrier lock-in".

Nexus 4 sold over a million units while competing in heavy traffic against all other android phones, to say nothing about IOS phones.

This from a phone that was aimed primarily at developers, not your average user. And the supply problem has been due to the fact that the average consumer is snapping it up in numbers no one anticipated for a developers device.

Apple's margin in the iPhone exceeds industry standards by a huge amount, 58% vs 20%. That's gouging by anyone's standards.

Sounds like they dumped you into the 5Gb "Unlimited Premium" plan, which includes tethering a.k.a. "Mobile HotSpot."
Info

HSPA+ is officially 4G according to ITU. Not to mention T-Mobile was using the 4G term before ITU tried to set their standard. So, please, stop with this stupid whining about the supposed misuse of 4G when you are clearly wrong since the standards group even says so..

There is a very useful table of prepaid plans over at Howard Forums. Since you have a GSM phone, you'll want one of the carriers that uses AT&T's or T-Mobile's network.

I'm pretty happy with T-Mobile's $30 monthly prepaid plan, since I rarely need many talk minutes and I'm willing to live with 2G data speeds until they refarm their 1900 MHz spectrum to support 3G later this year.

http://www.tmonews.com/2010/05/android-uma-phones-coming-soon/

This is the google support forum discussion that has earned all this bad press.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=0bd8ccd4799040c2&hl=en&fid=0bd8ccd4799040c200047c99c44ddfe6

By 6pm today I read most of these posts. There are several squeaky wheels that are posting over and over but there are also dozens of individuals that are all telling the same story. These people are in areas with good 3g reception (as confirmed by the coverage map or by another 3g t-mobile phone in the same place at the same time. They report that their N1 continually switches between edge and g3. Their data download rates are about 1/10th what they should be. Many have reported that the constant switching between networks is draining their battery within a few hours. When they call HTC for support, HTC blames T-mobile's network. T-mobile blames HTC and claims that they have not been given any support documentation on the N1 from Google or HTC. The complainers are in a wide variety of locations throughout the country.

Gizmodo reports on the story and claims that their phones have poor 3g reception as well:

http://gizmodo.com/5443123/does-the-nexus-one-have-3g-problems

The same problem crops up in the comments after this story at tmonews

http://www.tmonews.com/2010/01/nexus-one-incurring-3g-problems/

Lots of people are reporting the same problems here on the androidforums

http://androidforums.com/nexus-one/34321-nexus-one-3g-problems.html

So I really don't think this is due to ignorant customers. There is a real problem with at least some of these phones. It may be there is a batch out there with bad antennas, or there could be a software glitch. If it's software then one would hope a patch is coming from Google asap. Regardless of what the problem is, Google has made a terrible mistake in ignoring this for almost 2 days now. Even if they had replied in their own support forums just once saying "sorry we're on it get back to you soon." They might not look so bad. Personally I think Google's experience with leaving their "products" in beta for years on end has finally bitten them on the ass.

From TMONews:

"20:03] google just cease and desisted me
[20:15] cyanogenmod is probably going to be dead
[20:16] i'm opening a dialogue with them
[20:20] no they are talking specifically about the closed-source google apps
[20:20] and how i am not licensed to distribute them
[20:20] my argument is that i only develop for google-experience devices which are already licensed for these apps
[20:20] so we'll see what they say
[20:20] maybe we can work something out
[20:24] maps, market, talk, gmail, youtube"20:03] google just cease and desisted me
[20:15] cyanogenmod is probably going to be dead
[20:16] i'm opening a dialogue with them
[20:20] no they are talking specifically about the closed-source google apps
[20:20] and how i am not licensed to distribute them
[20:20] my argument is that i only develop for google-experience devices which are already licensed for these apps
[20:20] so we'll see what they say
[20:20] maybe we can work something out
[20:24] maps, market, talk, gmail, youtube"

Probably he will have to drop those apps. This will make loading Cyanogen a little more difficult. Next, will Google prevent him from using those apps to test his distro, or will they make it impossible to run them under his ROMs?

Somehow, this is beginning to look like the end of Google the Nice. The beginning of the open Google the Evil.

Kinda sad, but now that Android is important, the game changes.

This was actually first reported on TMoNews.com on 8/9/08, a day before BGR. Just want to give credit where credit is due. Here's the link to the original post: http://tmonews.com/forums/index.php?topic=939.0