T-Mobile 5GB Data Cap Total BS

I’m sure you know the meaning of the word “unlimited” pretty well, but just to not have a doubt of its meaning lets run a query at dictionary.com and see what we get.

according to dictionary.com the meaning of that word is:

1. not limited;  unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade.
2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies.
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.

Apparently T-mobile does not know the meaning of that word, because even though they advertise their data plans as unlimited, in reality is not true. I personally have been a T-mobile customer  for more than 8 years, and I’ve been managing the T-mobile corporate account at work for the last 2 years, and I never read or heard anywhere that T-mobile was capping their data pans.

But apparently they quietly started doing that in November 2010.

I found that out myself a couple of days ago when my MyTouch 4G stopped streaming music from my server. I wiped the device a couple of times thinking the issue probably was with the device itself, but even with the fresh reformatted system, I couldn’t even browse the Internet on the phone because it was too slow. then I thought of calling T-mobile, but before I did that I checked my-tmobile.com account, and this is what I saw under my data usage stats:

You have used over 5 GB of data this month. Your data speed has been reduced for the rest of this billing cycle per the terms of your plan.

What!!!! per the term of my plan my phone data speed was reduced to 0.006 Mbps according to speakeasy.net.

I was shocked, and felt deceived at the same time because I never read or heard of such term before.

Let’s reason for a moment, and let’s pretend we are in Cuba and we are being rationed with Internet data on our phones and lets break down what we can actually do with 5 GB of data transfer. I have all my music hosted at my server, and I stream the music from there to my phone when I’m on the road or working-out. let’s average all my MP3s files size to be 4 MB. with 5 GB I can stream 1,280 songs off my server to my phone. that might look a lot, but let’s continue with the math. 1,280 songs spread out in a month would  be 42 songs every day. I have caching setup on the mobile media player to cache the next 3 songs, just in case I lose reception or go under a tunnel, the music won’t stop playing, and because I normally play random songs, I might not like the next song, and I skip it, but because of the caching settings, that song was already downloaded, thus sucking up data off the measly 5GB T-mobile allows me to use.

I have calculated I use around 220 MB of data on my phone every day. that includes emails, music streaming, some YouTube videos, Facebook, Internet browsing, etc.

you might be thinking, dude, that’s more than enough, I barely use that in a month! I agree that some people might not use their smart phones for anything else other than emails, and browsing, but this is not what Mobile providers are promoting their smart phones for. you might also have heard about Google releasing a cloud service for people to host their music online and stream it to their mobile phones, also Apple is getting ready to release a similar service. don’t you think with these services becoming mainstream people won’t be hitting their data cap 10 days before their monthly billing cycle starts like me as well?

T-mobile must either get rid of this stupid policy, or raise the cap to at least 10 GB. otherwise people will be moving to Sprint.

My phone is useless right now, it takes more than 2 minutes to sync emails, and I cannot even visit some websites because they never load, and I still have 8 days remaining before Castro restores my full data speed. I’m pissed.

Most likely I’ll be switching to another provider once my 2 years contract with T-mobile is over. I heard Sprint does not have such data cap, so I might try them out. for now I’ll wait until Raul Castro restores my service…

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