If you earn less than $250,000 a year, you probably don't have to worry about higher taxes.
And even if you do earn that or more, the amount by which your taxes will go up will be offset by no longer having to pay some other expenses you'd otherwise incur.
Where I come from, hardly anyone has private health insurance, and even those who do would never pay $1000+ a month for it. Growing up, a doctors visit was subsidized such that the out of pocket cost was $10-15 (I'm guessing the equivalent of a co-pay - still is about this cost as of the last time I went back to visit).
Whereas in the US I see co-pays of $60-100 easy... and considering the minimum wage here, that just seems burdensome, which results in a lot of sick people not being able to get well - they can't afford to take time off work but also can't afford the doctor, and so they stay sick. It makes no sense to me.
And remember, even the highest proposed rate is still going to be WAY less than it was during the US boom-era, where lots of people seems to be doing perfectly bloody well for themselves. So quit your bitching.
People pay for way more than they're likely to use all the time - it's practically the business model for 3 of the 4 major US cellular providers.
And also why people rent/lease $700 devices for little more than accessing texts Facebook/Instagram/etc (despite a $100 device does that adequately), in addition to the $60/mo smartphone plan (and let's be honest, that's being pretty conservative). All this, whether they can afford it or not.
I (or you, if you were so inclined) could get the necessary numbers from the FCC and the necessary insurance then go to any town and get a franchise agreement and start building infrastructure next to any incumbent (because exclusive franchises haven't been legal for a while now).
If I/you had/have/were able to raise the funding, of course.
Problem with doing that is the incumbents tend to be a bit litigious. But that's a private anti-competition issue, not a protected monopoly/exclusive contract thing.
Unfortunately, they are right in that they don't have 100% of the US ISP market, therefore are not a monopoly at a federal level, despite the situation in any given ZIP code (which is where the problem lies).
If things were changed to prevent incumbents from suing potential competition out of business, though... that would probably help.
I dunno, I-90 between Erie and Buffalo NY isn't so great... And there are some toll-roads in KS (I can't remember the numbers, but going from KC to Wichita, for example) which aren't so hot either... And that one between Chicago and Detroit (actually, I think that's just a different section of I-90)... And some of the toll-roads in Italy are a bit bumpier than I'd like.
Meanwhile, many of the autobahns I've driven on (mostly in south Germany, between for example Heidelberg and Munich) are toll-free, partially speed-limit free and seem pretty well maintained, all things considered.
Yeah but for some reason Australia is prone to trying to replicate America and ballsing things up as a result.
Local Loop Unbundling seems to be working fairly well in New Zealand, even though Chorus (the local loop owner for both DSL and most of NZ's UFB fiber network) kicks up a fuss from time to time about their profits (which have been around what one would expect given the fairly significant CAPEX over the last few years).
But, thanks to the regulatory conditions, NZ residents can choose from 20-odd (or more?) ISPs no matter where they live, and can get any of the 3 types of service potentially available to them, whether ADSL/ADSL2+, VDSL (which was installed in roadside cabinets in many areas as a stepping stone to FTTH) or increasingly, Fiber - even in smaller towns (IIRC I seem to recall the project being ahead of schedule). Even my parents have fiber available to them, but haven't upgraded from DSL mainly because they can't be bothered.
A/VDSL is not rate limited (you get whatever the copper supports according to your loop length) and the speed/pricing tiers on fiber are basically the same throughout the country, so prices don't vary significantly between each type of service and or even between various ISPs (unlike the US) - people tend to select an ISP based on customer service or laziness... err... brand recognition (Telecom/Spark).
There may be white label/resellers who may be willing to get you connected using the same infrastructure - not quite as good as a fully independent ISP working on an unbundled loop, but at least you wouldn't have to deal with $large_isp customer service and they may even offer plans without caps and more transparent pricing (i.e. None of this "$20 for 6 months if you sign up for autopay so we can rape your wallet for the next 18 and tack on mysterious charges without you noticing" malarchy).
There may be caveats such as higher prices due to the plans being considered "SOHO" or "Small Business" plans rather than regular old "residential" class service, and most of the time they can't activate a customer-owned modem but other than that...
Disclaimer: My company can provide Cable, DSL, FiOS, IPTV & Cellular services to end-users in many parts of the US through resale agreements with most of the large ISPs. But at least our retail prices include taxes and fees.
Except these aren't TM's services and BingeOn includes Go90, Verizon's streaming service, as a kind of middle-finger poke at Verizon, in addition to which, there aren't any significant hurdles for being included in the list of BingeOn providers.
They don't throttle anything if you turn BingeOn off by logging in to my.t-mobile.com...
But when I'm watching on a phone or tablet, I'd rather use less data and stream at 480p than 1080p - I've personally found the difference to be negligible. I even used my TM Z915 Hotspot to stream Netflix from my Tablet to my Chromecast in a hotel room a couple of weeks ago and it was perfectly fine (and not having to put up with the hotel wifi made it even better).
Disclaimer: my company is a value-added reseller and has the ability to sell services utilizing all 4 of the major carriers, but, I prefer TM because overall I like most of what they're doing (even though we aren't allowed to offer BingeOn as a benefit to our own subscribers... yet).
They're nearly matching VZW in terms of population now, and based on reports they're only working to increase that... probably even take the lead in addition to adding more towers where they already exist (speculation on my part).
As for the coverage, yeah, that's a frequency problem. But they're starting to roll out LTE Band 12 (700MHz) now which is supposed to increase coverage and building penetration.
I would think that the combination of these two things will largely resolve the service issues.
(Disclaimer: Not an employee, but I like what they're doing with the network and my company offers some services atop TMUS).
There's no meddling on the device - it simply connects to a different APN on the provider network according to the use case (i.e. phone or tethered).
Maybe another way to look at it is like a user reaching a company via it's toll-free 1800 number versus dialing the local number - in the event you are on a plan without unlimited calling (or if you live in a country where 800 calls are not charged and local/long-distance calls are), one would cost and the other would not, even though the endpoint is the same.
Or yet another way to look at it is if your ISP offers a failover internet connection when your regular connection is down or when you're not at home: for example, under normal circumstances, your DSL/cable/FTTx is always on, but the ISP might have a dialup number or free wifi at isp hotspots as backup with say 20 free hours and if you go over the 20 free hours you get charged for it per the contract.
Same basic principle applies here: you have unlimited data on your *phone* but not unlimited data on the device(s) you tether to your phone - and naturally I can see the ISP getting pissy if you were somehow able to disguise the 20 free hours usage in such a way that the usage was never counted by the authentication mechanisms put in place by the ISP and I would imagine that defeating the authentication mechanisms is against the ISPs ToS and possibly even illegal in many countries.
None of this argument has anything to do with whether you own the device and how you use it or the devices connected to it, or whether the provider is "meddling with your device"; it's all about defeating the authentication and accounting mechanisms of the provider which is what is allegedly being done by these people.
I would suggest phone traffic is what ends up on your phone and tethered traffic is what goes through your phone when its used as a modem or hotspot, and that the latter states in the marketing and agreement that there is a limitation on data transfer, I.e. tethered data is not unlimited.
To make a comparison you could look at a triple-play connection: traffic going to the ISP issued IPTV box is not measured and the IPTV is a separate line item on the bill, but devices tethered to the DSL/Cable modem/router might have a data cap. On a home internet connection, you are tethering by default.
But to answer the question my understanding is that phone and tethering use separate apns in the same way the IPTV is on a separate VLAN, and that is most likely how they distinguish, not by (as you claim) sniffing your traffic/content. The way these people are using their connection is a specific violation of the terms of service because they are using workarounds to get around the established tethering limits.
On my networks I can easily see how much traffic has been passed by a given subscriber... That is a basic statistic. Seeing where that traffic was going and what was used and how many devices are on the LAN side of the router (assuming it is one we issue and the customer continues to grant us access to, which isnt common) is a whole different idea and not something we really employ, but even at the most basic level I can implement a control to mitigate the effects of excess traffic if you're a disruptive subscriber without knowing specifically what you are doing... It's not really a privacy issue, its just seeing that "oh, hey, this guy is continually transferring 2TB a month which is a bit excessive, we should probably do something about it"
Even my Nokia has that ability but the vast majority of people don't attach external storage to their phones so it's kind of beside the point and my previous statement still stands.
As has already been mentioned by myself and others, they are pretty explicit about the limitations on tethered data both contractually and in the marketing materials, and whether or not *you* believe there should be no difference, there is - for obvious reasons - and no deception has actually taken place here as the people in question have been using workarounds to disguise their usage.
So while it could be hailed as a technological victory that the network handles this kind of usage with little ill effect, super excessive usage isn't really fair to the rest of us who take unlimited to mean "reasonable and responsible" rather than "100% saturation for 720 hours a month" and who stay within the bounds of our contracted tethering limits.
Yes yes, data is data etc however as it has been pointed out by others, they explicitly state that tethering is a non-unlimited addon which comes with (depending on who you ask) 5 or 7GB worth of data.
The average phone has 32 or 64GB of storage, so the assumption probably is that even the heaviest user will sit at around 50GB even if they download and entire phone worth of stuff every month, meaning that 50GB of usage is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited.
If you are using your tethering through your phone as your primary Internet connection (places where wired Internet is not available notwithstanding), you're doing it wrong anyway.
And downloading 2TB a month? Over mobile? Come on, seriously?
Incorrect. The unlimited data applies to phone traffic, not tethered and they make that pretty clear.
So they're going to selectively cut off subscribers who abuse tethering by using apps to disguise it as phone traffic, whereas tethering is explicitly limited to 5GB or so in marketing materials and contracts.
I actually use this analogy in our FUP information in India... except, in mine, the analogy is extended to include sharing of your buffet meal with friends, family and neighbours (to prevent a household signing up and sharing it with the whole building).
Except as it has already been pointed out, it was not unlimited *tethered* data. That was strictly defined as being 5GB or so.
So while it might piss off the 3,000 subscribers they're looking to kick off the network (out of what, 59 million or so?), it's justified in this particular instance.
What I heard during a discussion on Periscope with John was more about people using 2TB for in a semi-commercial sense (as a backup for some other kind of line) and obviously this is not OK.
That being said, using wireless for P2P/Torrents is an horrible idea anyway - it's just not that good and a lot of wireless equipment (even the good stuff) falls over when there are too many TCP connections - most of the time, this causes a kind of ping timeout and it auto-reboots but then you have a node offline for several minutes and that's never a good thing.
As for the argument about unlimited, well, there's unlimited and there's unlimited - while some might argue that this must be interpreted to mean "I can saturate my line at 100% throughput for 720 hours per month", that's just not practical for either the ISP or for the end user (on a 100mb connection that's ~30TB) since bandwidth is contended (unless you're one of the lucky few whose ISP doesn't contend bandwidth).
In my view, having in place a soft-cap isn't entirely unreasonable -- so long as the cap itself is reasonable and not something stupidly low (and doesn't result in overage fees or slowdowns, but results in some kind of usage-watch so that ISP and subscriber can rectify the situation by changing the plan or whatever, like the FUPs I've seen on ISPs in places like Singapore and Japan).
On broadband connections (as defined by the FCC), 10-20GB per megabit sold seems like a figure that would work for the vast majority of people, equating to between 250 & 500 GB at the lowest end and 1000-2000GB on a 100mb connection - the local cableco where I'm based (when I'm in the US) has plans with FUPs up to 3TB (at a speed of 150mbit/s). As for the rest of the country still on sub-Broadband Internet, maybe 50GB per megabit sold would be workable.
How does this relate to T-Mobile and it's kicking off the heaviest users? Well, again, there's unlimited and there's unlimited. It all comes down to what I would call "reasonable use" - 2TB is probably not reasonable use; whereas 50GB arguably is. Maybe even 100GB. And if you're using more than this on your mobile/tethering, you should probably have a wired connection instead, anyway (in my opinion).
I will grant that there are obviously areas where people simply can't get a workable wired connection so as a compromise, T-Mobile might want to consider having some kind of plan at a reasonable price for users who just can't get anything other than mobile.
If I call back a number I don't recognize, you can be damn sure it's from something like Google Voice which, because I don't have a number specifically attached to it, usually gives "unknown" for the caller ID, and I can take whatever action I see fit according to whether I get a person, IVR or voicemail when I make the call.
It also helps that I have a number from an area I've never lived in or even been to so that I can be relatively sure any numbers calling me from that area code are spam.
Slashdot Mirror
If you earn less than $250,000 a year, you probably don't have to worry about higher taxes.
And even if you do earn that or more, the amount by which your taxes will go up will be offset by no longer having to pay some other expenses you'd otherwise incur.
Where I come from, hardly anyone has private health insurance, and even those who do would never pay $1000+ a month for it. Growing up, a doctors visit was subsidized such that the out of pocket cost was $10-15 (I'm guessing the equivalent of a co-pay - still is about this cost as of the last time I went back to visit).
Whereas in the US I see co-pays of $60-100 easy... and considering the minimum wage here, that just seems burdensome, which results in a lot of sick people not being able to get well - they can't afford to take time off work but also can't afford the doctor, and so they stay sick. It makes no sense to me.
And remember, even the highest proposed rate is still going to be WAY less than it was during the US boom-era, where lots of people seems to be doing perfectly bloody well for themselves. So quit your bitching.
People pay for way more than they're likely to use all the time - it's practically the business model for 3 of the 4 major US cellular providers.
And also why people rent/lease $700 devices for little more than accessing texts Facebook/Instagram/etc (despite a $100 device does that adequately), in addition to the $60/mo smartphone plan (and let's be honest, that's being pretty conservative). All this, whether they can afford it or not.
And yet ISPs change terms of service and their contracted rates all the time.
I (or you, if you were so inclined) could get the necessary numbers from the FCC and the necessary insurance then go to any town and get a franchise agreement and start building infrastructure next to any incumbent (because exclusive franchises haven't been legal for a while now).
If I/you had/have/were able to raise the funding, of course.
Problem with doing that is the incumbents tend to be a bit litigious. But that's a private anti-competition issue, not a protected monopoly/exclusive contract thing.
Unfortunately, they are right in that they don't have 100% of the US ISP market, therefore are not a monopoly at a federal level, despite the situation in any given ZIP code (which is where the problem lies).
If things were changed to prevent incumbents from suing potential competition out of business, though... that would probably help.
I dunno, I-90 between Erie and Buffalo NY isn't so great...
And there are some toll-roads in KS (I can't remember the numbers, but going from KC to Wichita, for example) which aren't so hot either...
And that one between Chicago and Detroit (actually, I think that's just a different section of I-90)...
And some of the toll-roads in Italy are a bit bumpier than I'd like.
Meanwhile, many of the autobahns I've driven on (mostly in south Germany, between for example Heidelberg and Munich) are toll-free, partially speed-limit free and seem pretty well maintained, all things considered.
And this is just in the last few months.
But that could just be the Germans for you.
Yeah but for some reason Australia is prone to trying to replicate America and ballsing things up as a result.
Local Loop Unbundling seems to be working fairly well in New Zealand, even though Chorus (the local loop owner for both DSL and most of NZ's UFB fiber network) kicks up a fuss from time to time about their profits (which have been around what one would expect given the fairly significant CAPEX over the last few years).
But, thanks to the regulatory conditions, NZ residents can choose from 20-odd (or more?) ISPs no matter where they live, and can get any of the 3 types of service potentially available to them, whether ADSL/ADSL2+, VDSL (which was installed in roadside cabinets in many areas as a stepping stone to FTTH) or increasingly, Fiber - even in smaller towns (IIRC I seem to recall the project being ahead of schedule). Even my parents have fiber available to them, but haven't upgraded from DSL mainly because they can't be bothered.
A/VDSL is not rate limited (you get whatever the copper supports according to your loop length) and the speed/pricing tiers on fiber are basically the same throughout the country, so prices don't vary significantly between each type of service and or even between various ISPs (unlike the US) - people tend to select an ISP based on customer service or laziness... err... brand recognition (Telecom/Spark).
There may be white label/resellers who may be willing to get you connected using the same infrastructure - not quite as good as a fully independent ISP working on an unbundled loop, but at least you wouldn't have to deal with $large_isp customer service and they may even offer plans without caps and more transparent pricing (i.e. None of this "$20 for 6 months if you sign up for autopay so we can rape your wallet for the next 18 and tack on mysterious charges without you noticing" malarchy).
There may be caveats such as higher prices due to the plans being considered "SOHO" or "Small Business" plans rather than regular old "residential" class service, and most of the time they can't activate a customer-owned modem but other than that...
Disclaimer: My company can provide Cable, DSL, FiOS, IPTV & Cellular services to end-users in many parts of the US through resale agreements with most of the large ISPs. But at least our retail prices include taxes and fees.
Ah, yes. Yeah, that'll happen with nascent markets in countries which have barely opened up to the outside world.
Other than that, how'd you like it?
Out of interest, which deepest darkest bumfuskistan specifically were you in?
You and I should talk.
Except these aren't TM's services and BingeOn includes Go90, Verizon's streaming service, as a kind of middle-finger poke at Verizon, in addition to which, there aren't any significant hurdles for being included in the list of BingeOn providers.
They don't throttle anything if you turn BingeOn off by logging in to my.t-mobile.com...
But when I'm watching on a phone or tablet, I'd rather use less data and stream at 480p than 1080p - I've personally found the difference to be negligible. I even used my TM Z915 Hotspot to stream Netflix from my Tablet to my Chromecast in a hotel room a couple of weeks ago and it was perfectly fine (and not having to put up with the hotel wifi made it even better).
Disclaimer: my company is a value-added reseller and has the ability to sell services utilizing all 4 of the major carriers, but, I prefer TM because overall I like most of what they're doing (even though we aren't allowed to offer BingeOn as a benefit to our own subscribers... yet).
They're nearly matching VZW in terms of population now, and based on reports they're only working to increase that... probably even take the lead in addition to adding more towers where they already exist (speculation on my part).
As for the coverage, yeah, that's a frequency problem. But they're starting to roll out LTE Band 12 (700MHz) now which is supposed to increase coverage and building penetration.
I would think that the combination of these two things will largely resolve the service issues.
(Disclaimer: Not an employee, but I like what they're doing with the network and my company offers some services atop TMUS).
There's no meddling on the device - it simply connects to a different APN on the provider network according to the use case (i.e. phone or tethered).
Maybe another way to look at it is like a user reaching a company via it's toll-free 1800 number versus dialing the local number - in the event you are on a plan without unlimited calling (or if you live in a country where 800 calls are not charged and local/long-distance calls are), one would cost and the other would not, even though the endpoint is the same.
Or yet another way to look at it is if your ISP offers a failover internet connection when your regular connection is down or when you're not at home: for example, under normal circumstances, your DSL/cable/FTTx is always on, but the ISP might have a dialup number or free wifi at isp hotspots as backup with say 20 free hours and if you go over the 20 free hours you get charged for it per the contract.
Same basic principle applies here: you have unlimited data on your *phone* but not unlimited data on the device(s) you tether to your phone - and naturally I can see the ISP getting pissy if you were somehow able to disguise the 20 free hours usage in such a way that the usage was never counted by the authentication mechanisms put in place by the ISP and I would imagine that defeating the authentication mechanisms is against the ISPs ToS and possibly even illegal in many countries.
None of this argument has anything to do with whether you own the device and how you use it or the devices connected to it, or whether the provider is "meddling with your device"; it's all about defeating the authentication and accounting mechanisms of the provider which is what is allegedly being done by these people.
I would suggest phone traffic is what ends up on your phone and tethered traffic is what goes through your phone when its used as a modem or hotspot, and that the latter states in the marketing and agreement that there is a limitation on data transfer, I.e. tethered data is not unlimited.
To make a comparison you could look at a triple-play connection: traffic going to the ISP issued IPTV box is not measured and the IPTV is a separate line item on the bill, but devices tethered to the DSL/Cable modem/router might have a data cap. On a home internet connection, you are tethering by default.
But to answer the question my understanding is that phone and tethering use separate apns in the same way the IPTV is on a separate VLAN, and that is most likely how they distinguish, not by (as you claim) sniffing your traffic/content. The way these people are using their connection is a specific violation of the terms of service because they are using workarounds to get around the established tethering limits.
On my networks I can easily see how much traffic has been passed by a given subscriber... That is a basic statistic. Seeing where that traffic was going and what was used and how many devices are on the LAN side of the router (assuming it is one we issue and the customer continues to grant us access to, which isnt common) is a whole different idea and not something we really employ, but even at the most basic level I can implement a control to mitigate the effects of excess traffic if you're a disruptive subscriber without knowing specifically what you are doing... It's not really a privacy issue, its just seeing that "oh, hey, this guy is continually transferring 2TB a month which is a bit excessive, we should probably do something about it"
Even my Nokia has that ability but the vast majority of people don't attach external storage to their phones so it's kind of beside the point and my previous statement still stands.
As has already been mentioned by myself and others, they are pretty explicit about the limitations on tethered data both contractually and in the marketing materials, and whether or not *you* believe there should be no difference, there is - for obvious reasons - and no deception has actually taken place here as the people in question have been using workarounds to disguise their usage.
So while it could be hailed as a technological victory that the network handles this kind of usage with little ill effect, super excessive usage isn't really fair to the rest of us who take unlimited to mean "reasonable and responsible" rather than "100% saturation for 720 hours a month" and who stay within the bounds of our contracted tethering limits.
Yes yes, data is data etc however as it has been pointed out by others, they explicitly state that tethering is a non-unlimited addon which comes with (depending on who you ask) 5 or 7GB worth of data.
The average phone has 32 or 64GB of storage, so the assumption probably is that even the heaviest user will sit at around 50GB even if they download and entire phone worth of stuff every month, meaning that 50GB of usage is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited.
If you are using your tethering through your phone as your primary Internet connection (places where wired Internet is not available notwithstanding), you're doing it wrong anyway.
And downloading 2TB a month? Over mobile? Come on, seriously?
Incorrect. The unlimited data applies to phone traffic, not tethered and they make that pretty clear.
So they're going to selectively cut off subscribers who abuse tethering by using apps to disguise it as phone traffic, whereas tethering is explicitly limited to 5GB or so in marketing materials and contracts.
Unlimited data, but specifically *not* unlimited tethering.
They are defined differently in the materials, so it *is* Joe Torrent fucking things up for everyone else by using a workaround to disguise tethering.
I actually use this analogy in our FUP information in India... except, in mine, the analogy is extended to include sharing of your buffet meal with friends, family and neighbours (to prevent a household signing up and sharing it with the whole building).
That sounds vaguely like 95th percentile billing. Which is something I quite like, mostly for the reasons you state.
That's only 6-7-ish megabits CBR. On LTE that's not out of the question.
Phone data (unlimited) and tethered data (not unlimited) are defined differently in the contract, and that is the complaint T-Mobile is making here.
Except as it has already been pointed out, it was not unlimited *tethered* data. That was strictly defined as being 5GB or so.
So while it might piss off the 3,000 subscribers they're looking to kick off the network (out of what, 59 million or so?), it's justified in this particular instance.
What I heard during a discussion on Periscope with John was more about people using 2TB for in a semi-commercial sense (as a backup for some other kind of line) and obviously this is not OK.
That being said, using wireless for P2P/Torrents is an horrible idea anyway - it's just not that good and a lot of wireless equipment (even the good stuff) falls over when there are too many TCP connections - most of the time, this causes a kind of ping timeout and it auto-reboots but then you have a node offline for several minutes and that's never a good thing.
As for the argument about unlimited, well, there's unlimited and there's unlimited - while some might argue that this must be interpreted to mean "I can saturate my line at 100% throughput for 720 hours per month", that's just not practical for either the ISP or for the end user (on a 100mb connection that's ~30TB) since bandwidth is contended (unless you're one of the lucky few whose ISP doesn't contend bandwidth).
In my view, having in place a soft-cap isn't entirely unreasonable -- so long as the cap itself is reasonable and not something stupidly low (and doesn't result in overage fees or slowdowns, but results in some kind of usage-watch so that ISP and subscriber can rectify the situation by changing the plan or whatever, like the FUPs I've seen on ISPs in places like Singapore and Japan).
On broadband connections (as defined by the FCC), 10-20GB per megabit sold seems like a figure that would work for the vast majority of people, equating to between 250 & 500 GB at the lowest end and 1000-2000GB on a 100mb connection - the local cableco where I'm based (when I'm in the US) has plans with FUPs up to 3TB (at a speed of 150mbit/s). As for the rest of the country still on sub-Broadband Internet, maybe 50GB per megabit sold would be workable.
How does this relate to T-Mobile and it's kicking off the heaviest users? Well, again, there's unlimited and there's unlimited. It all comes down to what I would call "reasonable use" - 2TB is probably not reasonable use; whereas 50GB arguably is. Maybe even 100GB. And if you're using more than this on your mobile/tethering, you should probably have a wired connection instead, anyway (in my opinion).
I will grant that there are obviously areas where people simply can't get a workable wired connection so as a compromise, T-Mobile might want to consider having some kind of plan at a reasonable price for users who just can't get anything other than mobile.
If I call back a number I don't recognize, you can be damn sure it's from something like Google Voice which, because I don't have a number specifically attached to it, usually gives "unknown" for the caller ID, and I can take whatever action I see fit according to whether I get a person, IVR or voicemail when I make the call.
It also helps that I have a number from an area I've never lived in or even been to so that I can be relatively sure any numbers calling me from that area code are spam.