Ten Lies T-Mobile Told Me About My Data Plan

reifman (786887) writes "Last June, my post "Yes, You Can Spend $750 in International Data Roaming in One Minute on AT&T" was slashdotted and this led to T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeting 'how crappy @ATT is' and welcoming me to the fold. Unfortunately, now it's TMobile that's having trouble tracking data; it seems to be related to the rollout of their new DataStash promotion. Just like AT&T, they're blaming the customer. Here are the ten lies T-Mobile told me about my data usage today."

Comments

heres another lie.

[nimbius]

Your data plan doesnt take into account advertisements which are basically subsidized at your expense. It doesnt count the silent data collection performed by most apps, or silent updates performed in the background. root your phone, install http://fdroid.org/ and download adaway to null-route advertising servers and reclaim some of your data plan

Re:heres another lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it has an Apple logo on it, duh! How else do you expect me to fit in with the cool kids?

Re: heres another lie.

[Sable Drakon]

Settings>Data Usage>(Insert Offending App Here)>Restrict Background Data checkbox. Tick that box on, and the app won't be able to use cellular data.

Re:heres another lie.

[chihowa]

Just in case it wasn't clear from the post above, you lose LTE/3G but still retain EDGE access. Email, light web browsing, maps, and the like still work fine on EDGE, just more slowly. I've rarely gone over, but only dropping my speed when I do is just about the best reaction to an overage that I've seen.

Re:Here's one

[wolrahnaes]

Two words for you:

Google Voice

Not only does it give you great voicemail but you get the option of a second number on which you can filter and forward calls to your heart's content, plus free texting, and you can access it all from your computer, tablet, whatever. For the anti-Google crowd there are a number of other providers offering similar services, any VoIP provider is technically capable of doing it.

Carrier voicemail is a pile of crap across the board, I haven't used it since I got a smartphone.

Let's get technical

[arth1]

From TFA:

It also remains a bit frustrating to me that the carriers are allowed to bill you for data amounts without actually having to show you the URL endpoints related to each data packet.

Um, wot? First of all the endpoints are not URLs - presumably he doesn't know the difference between socket addresses and URLs.

But to present a list of each data packet? I don't think this guy has any idea at all of how networking works. Even if his phone operated with an X.25 1500 byte packet size and everything he sent or received were even multiples of that, a 3 GB usage would then mean at least two million lines listing endpoints. In real life usage, much more.

ThreeUK's "All You Can Eat" plan is the dog's bits

[ihtoit]

they have the most amazing thing going on there. £15 a month and you get so many minutes and so many texts, but the selling point is this, and this is right off the T&C page:

"When we say all you can eat, that's what we mean. We do have a hard cap for domestic and pay as you go customers, but it's a cap you're unlikely to hit even if you saturate your connection 24/7 for a month."

That connection is a 7MBit 3G cellular, and the cap is 1000GB. You CAN hit 1000GB a month but only if you can clear 34GB a DAY. That's a 100% wall-to-wall saturation of your connection with NO interruptions.

I've been on this plan for several years now and NEVER ONCE have I managed to hit the cap. And I'm a heavy tethered torrenter.

Re:Article bad web page design

[Anonymous Coward]

> In Firefox selecting the View/Page Style/No Style menu option will turn off the crappy graphic decisions made by the web site author

I find that killing the style sheet usually just trades bad color scheme for bad layout.

I use the no color add-on which puts a button on the toolbar to toggle a page between color and black-and-white without affecting the layout.