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T-Mobile is Making Its 'Unlimited' Data Plan Even More Confusing (theverge.com)
When T-Mobile announced "One" plan, little did the company know that people wouldn't like seeing their "unlimited" data plan offer video streaming max out at 480p resolution. The company is making some tweaks to that plan, only to make things more confusing to people. It will now begin selling "HD day passes" for $3 per day, allowing customers to stream in 1080p for 24 hours. The Verge reports: That's simple enough, but here's where it gets really weird: T-Mobile is also offering a plan called T-Mobile One Plus, which, among other benefits, offers unlimited HD day passes. So by subscribing to the plan, you can stream 1080p video all you want every single day -- but only if you go and activate the HD day pass again every single day. Presumably, T-Mobile is hoping you'll forget to activate those passes, or else it would have just lifted the 480p quality limit without this bizarre constraint. Making this even more confusing, T-Mobile originally announced plans to offer an "HD add-on" for the One plan that offered unlimited HD streaming without constraints. That's no longer going to be an option, however, so if you want HD video streaming, you're stuck re-enabling it every day. A T-Mobile rep framed the change as "giving customers more" for the same price, which is true (both cost $25 extra per month), but the new plan also involves the strange new reactivation hurdle.
How can T-Mobile differentiate between these,
as far as I know the connection to youtube is cryptographically secured.
So one could be guessing by the data rate and the duration, but with browsers using buffering that would be complicated.
However I would tunnel the traffic through my trusty unlimited broadband at home or my root server, using ssh.
So T-Mobile ain't see nothing yet !?
**1 -- Not applicable to all plans. Void where prohibited. See merchant for more details. Days that end in Y are excluded. Mobile data restrictions apply. The party of the first part is not beholden to the party of the second part, but is otherwise beholden themselves to the third. Prior approval is required for data entitlement. Data packets larger than 100bytes subject to fee.
It's $50 ($55 with tax).
I get unlimited music and 1 gig of data.
Recently right as the month ends I'm hitting 900mb (and that's with youtube videos).
They tried to upsell me to the post paid plan.
It was $70 ($77 with tax). And otherwise the same plan.
I looked at the salesperson and explained my plan again.
She went, "oh.. right" and stopped.
Do you have a great plan to recommend? I'd love to hear it. Every month, I have the option of changing plans or even services. I love it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The daypass thing is mildly more confusing, but I suspect part of the logic is to encourage use of the Binge-On technology, without which towers are likely to get clogged pretty quickly. I also suspect that the soft limit of 27G a month will be torn through pretty quickly by anyone making heavy use of HD video. Go over the 27G and you're "deprioritized" - you'll get full service during quiet times, but you'll be throttled when everyone else is trying to use the network (which is fair, but you probably don't want it to happen to you!)
The big improvement is that Tethering is now an acceptable half-megabit/s, rather than 2G speeds. That makes "Unlimited tethering" actually useful again.
The big question for me is how to encourage video streaming companies to sign up to Binge-On if there's no incentive. In theory, they can just transmit 1080p over HTTPS (protocols like DASH are HTTPS friendly) and T-Mobile will never know.
With the original implementation, the advantage was that your viewers could watch your services without worrying about it coming out of their data. But if data is unlimited...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This whole thing is playing havoc with its (relative) coolness reputation.
My basic take it is this. No one especially a data carrier should have any right to inspect packets I PAY to transmit any more then they have the right to randomly search my car without legal cause and search warrant. It should and needs to be ILLEGAL for any data provided to in anyway inspect or log traffic contents or destinations unless it is for purposes of debugging a problem. If they want to meter the amount of data fine, make it clear in the contract, they have no more business knowing what I send and receive then the electric company who powers the routers. Sorry that doesn't allow carries to milk their current networks for every last penny they can stick it to people for , but customers have a right to privacy that includes not having a corporate hack decide which data I'm worthy to receive and what rates, we agree, I pay, end of story. All this traffic inspection is violation of basic privacy and as a society and as consumers we should vehemently oppose it. Perhaps apple and Google should start enabling router based TOR by default on their phones. Sad that it has to come to that, because tor is a bandwidth hog but if carriers aren't going to treat people right that is what everyone should start doing.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Unless you intend to give up on cell service entirely, all you are doing is trading one devil for another. Even an MVNO like straight talk isn't an option, since part of your monthly fee is going into the pockets of one of the big 4 to cover tower usage.