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T-Mobile Starts Going After Heavy Users of Tethered Data
VentureBeat reports that T-Mobile CEO John Legere has announced that T-Mobile will cut off (at least from "unlimited" data plans) customers who gloss over the fine print of their data-use agreement by tethering their unlimited-data phones and grab too much of the network's resources. In a series of tweets on Sunday, Legere says the company will be "eliminating anyone who abuses our network," and complains that some "network abusers" are using 2TB of data monthly. The article says, "This is the first official word from the carrier that seems to confirm a memo that was leaked earlier this month. At that time, it was said action would be taken starting August 17 and would go after those who used their unlimited LTE data for Torrents and peer-to-peer networking."
I wonder whether it's actually even being used for tethering at all. Technically, there's no reason you can't just run a torrent app on a phone. My phone has 96GB of storage in it (counting SD card) and can access more than 5TB via LAN when I'm at home; if I *wanted* to use it for torrenting I could (and I'd be tempted to, because My T-Mobile connection is faster than my wired one).
With that said, wireless bandwidth is a limited resource that needs to be shared across a lot of people. There's a lot of really excellent use cases for it, and massive torrenting is one of them. I'm 100% in agreement with you that they shouldn't call it "unlimited" if they're going to put limits on it (though they'll probably try to weasel that by saying "it's only unlimited for un-tethered data; i.e. that which will be used by the phone directly!" Having good reason to not actually make something unlimited doesn't excuse calling it what it isn't.
Making the "Umlimited" plan only actually 100GB (before you get throttled like everybody else who goes over their limit; TMoUS never actually kills your data connection) would be pretty reasonable, I think. Throw in an increase to the official tethering cap for such accounts (currently 5GB) so that people who want to use the connection with their PC can do it without relying on hokey apps that try to enable tethering in ways the phone OS and network provider can't tell... well, I'm actually in favor of that! Yes, it'll limit me to approximately 7x as much data as I've ever used in a month, but it'll also keep that network more useful.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I'm with T-Mobile right now. I give them credit for forcing the other carriers to at least pretend to lower the prices on their plans... but it's become apparent to me recently that the way T-Mobile does it is by not training their support personnel *at all*.
T-Mobile recently announced a plan called "10GB North America". It's 4 lines, each with 10GB of data, for $120. And if you sign up before Labor Day, it's $110 because the 4th line is free. Well, I'm having a dickens of a time getting their reps to figure out that there's no way this should amount to $191/month for our four lines (total bill was $226 or thereabouts, but we have one phone on the installment plan).
I have a job - I don't have free hours available to teach these bozos how 3rd grade math works. But I'm going to end up having to print everything out, take time off work, and get those printouts into one of their stores to get this fixed because their phone support and their Twitter support are apparently morons.
#DeleteChrome
Essentially it's OK to lie if you offer a product but not if you buy it.
It also highlights that operators try to tie specific devices to services instead of managing the "problem" on the server/provider side.
In all it's about being open, not locking in the customer. It's better to be straight with the customer about the fact that there is a ceiling on the usage.
Then there's another question of how the users really are able to run up a traffic volume in the terabyte class. That's actually pretty amazing, but if someone is streaming HD movies I can imagine that it may be chewing away the bytes pretty fast, but according to some a HD movie is about 2GB/hour. So that means 1000 hours for 2TB - and that means that you need to watch movies every hour in a month and still not reach 2TB.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have heard of people chewing up that much bandwidth.
Basically they were packrats, torrenting more than they could ever really hope to watch.
Or there was that dude that ran a home server with TB worth of movies (that he seems to have legally owned) that he made available to his family to stream.
There are few of them, but they do exist.
Yes, that guy exists but he wasn't using the phone network to stream his data. He was using a cable (or maybe fiber) network that is better designed to handle these sorts of loads. Unless someone is using their phone to feed data to a PC I'm having a hard time seeing how they use 2TB a month.
California is a big place. I get LTE in the all the major cities and most of the smaller ones along the I-5 corridor. You won't get it in the boonies, though; LTE is fast but not good for wide-area coverage.
The problem is, when you don't get LTE, you also mostly don't get HSDPA. Because T-Mobile's coverage is so shit, you're lucky if you can get EDGE. Which, by the way, doesn't work either. You cannot actually load a webpage over it. Ask me how I know.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"