T-Mobile To Throttle Customers Who Use Unlimited LTE Data For Torrents/P2P

New submitter User0x45 writes: Here's a nicely transparent announcement: "T-mobile has identified customers who are heavy data users and are engaged in peer-to-peer file sharing, and tethering outside of T-Mobile’s Terms and Conditions (T&C). This results in a negative data network experience for T-Mobile customers. Beginning August 17, T-Mobile will begin to address customers who are conducting activities outside of T-Mobile’s T&Cs." Obviously, it's not a good announcement for people with unlimited plans, but at least it's clear. T-mobile also pulled the backwards anti-net neutrality thing by happily announcing 'Free Streaming' from select music providers... which is, in effect, making non-select usage fee-based.

Comments

Re:This is going to end so well for them!

[AvitarX]

There is no unlimited tethering, and they aren't throttling capped data.

They are throttling phone based P2P, and (as I read it) separately, unauthorized tethering.

WoW distribution, needing to be tethered, would be capped data and not throttled.

It's people like me that have downloaded movies on the go to watch that would be throttled.

Re:This is going to end so well for them!

[meta-monkey]

I can't necessarily disagree. I know, I know, the /. refrain is "if it's not unlimited they shouldn't have called it unlimited!" Fine. Maybe they should say "almost unlimited." What they're trying to say is that you don't need to watch a meter when you're checking your email and surfing the web on your phone. But come on, torrenting movies over your phone data plan? Really? You think the network can handle that?

Yeah, McDonald's says "free refills." But I'm pretty sure if you try to hook up a garden hose to the soda fountain and pump gallons of coke into a drum they're going to kindly ask you to leave.

Re:In before

[BronsCon]

Actually, they're pretty clear about their terms of use, and there's no restriction on the *amount* of data, so it is, in fact, unlimited. I'm saying this as an affected user; I fully expect to get a call from T-Mobile about my data usage, as I'm uploading >10GB/mo via an automated process, and have been doing so for the past year or so. Honestly, I've been expecting the call for some time, so I'll actually be surprised if I don't get it sometime this year.

That said, the process in question is uploading video to YouTube, so it's just as likely they won't flag it because it's not continuous and it's not P2P.

I do know that AT&T cut my wife's grandfathered unlimited data down to 2GB, with a warning and throttling at that point, while charging her the same price I was paying for 4GB on the same account. That's one of the reasons we're no longer with them. T-Mobile isn't doing that here, and I really have no complaints with how they're handling it; I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner.