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

Re: AT&T

[Anonymous Coward]

The new "unlimited" plans clearly state that your connection will be throttled at a certain point. That should give them cover going forward.

This ruling is on plans where the customer was not told they would be throttled.

At least that is my understanding.

Something's missing

[Sarten-X]

I feel like there's something more to this story.

T-Mobile's "unlimited" plans are what I use, and they've always been pretty straightforward about what that means... They don't hit you with a hard-stop limit, but after a particular chunk of full-speed data, they cut you back to "3G speed". All of their marketing material that's I've paid attention to has stated that plainly (to an engineer), in print that wasn't particularly small.

I can't say I've ever found the advertisements to be particularly misleading (or the policy to be particularly limiting), but I'm not as touchy as some consumers are, I guess.

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.

Re:I thought this was obvious?

[CheeseTroll]

Like a good Slashdotter, I originally posted without reading the article, but then went back and read the details.
Sounds like this applies to their "unlimited" plan which was not clear that they'd *eventually* throttle that plan, too.

FTA: "T-Mobile failed to adequately inform its unlimited data plan customers that, under a “Top 3 Percent Policy,” their data would be slowed at times if they used more than 17 gigabytes in a given month, the FCC said. It said the company had agreed to update its disclosures to better explain who may be affected."

Oops.

Re: A speed limit

[Anonymous Coward]

It's constantly available and there are no limits on when you can use it. In one very clear use of the word unlimited, the plan is unlimited.

I thought they were very clear about the throttling. This is ignorant people being upset because they aren't smart enough to understand their plan.

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?

Re: AT&T

[SvnLyrBrto]

The problem here is that words mean things. And when the carriers throw out words like "unlimited", when what they're selling is not in fact unlimited; they are being duplicitous. And they absolutely deserve to be slapped down for that. And whether a technical person should know that they are lying does not change the fact that they are lying. Remember, not everyone is a technical person. If they'd just spell out EXACTLY what they are selling at EXACTLY the price they're charging upfront, with no "gotchas" buried in the fine print, there'd be no issue.

Honestly? They're dumb data pipes, like any other. There's no good reason they should be treated like anything else. And I wish they'd stop trying to imagine themselves otherwise and just sell me bandwidth like any other provider: Give me guaranteed and burstable Mbps rates; and sod off as to whether I use it for voice, data, video, music, tethering, VPN, running a web or email server, or just downloading Linux ISOs to /dev/null 24/7 because I can.

Re:A speed limit

[gnick]

A speed limit is infact a limit, so the FCC is correct - the plan is not unlimited.

So you're demanding unlimited speed? Good luck with that.