T-Mobile Fined $48 Million By FCC For Mischaracterizing 'Unlimited' Plan and Throttling Users' Data (bloomberg.com)

T-Mobile will have to pay $48 million in fines after reaching a settlement with the FCC over the way it promoted its unlimited data plans. T-Mobile's unlimited data plans don't charge you for going over a certain data limit, but the carrier can slow down connection speeds after you reach a certain threshold. From a Bloomberg report: The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday announced the settlement, including a $7.5 million fine and $35.5 million worth of discounted gear or data for customers of third-largest U.S. wireless carrier T-Mobile and its MetroPCS unit. An investigation found that company policy allows T-Mobile to decrease data speeds when customers on plans sold as unlimited exceed a monthly data threshold, the FCC said in a news release. The agency heard from hundreds of "unhappy" customers who complained of slow speeds and said they weren't receiving what they were sold, according to the news release.

Comments

I thought this was obvious?

[CheeseTroll]

I've been a T-mobile customer for several years, and I thought it was pretty obvious that they'd throttle the data when you reached your plan's threshold. Did they, at some point, market the plans as "unlimited data at 4G speeds"? Or are certain customers being deliberately obtuse?

Beats the heck out of getting cut off completely, or worse - getting charged a zillion bucks for data overages.

Yeah, ouch.

[ashshy]

That's barely a slap on the wrist for Big Magenta. More of a gentle tickle, really.

Using free data sources like Yahoo Finance, you can easily see that TMUS collected $33.9 billion in revenue over the last four quarters. $1.1 billion trickled down to become bottom-line profit. This $48 million fine is a rounding error compared to the company's sales and just 4.4% of its trailing profits.

Put another way, the company has 67 million total subscribers. If T-Mobile paid back the entire fine directly to its customers, it'd be a grand total of 72 cents each. Please sir, may I have another?