You likely don't use enough data to see the throttling. But it's been shown that they do throttle their unlimited plans, as everyone else does. You're lucky with LTE, as they have the worst LTE coverage of the four.
And, yeah, they've been caught BSing their customers.
Of course "it's been shown" because T-Mobile tells you right up front how much 4G/LTE data you get every month before throttling kicks in. You're making it sound like they somehow hide the data caps from their customers. Technically, I have an unlimited plan, but T-Mobile always described it as a "5 GB 4G" plan. And unlike these grandfathered "unlimited" plans, T-Mobile offers an actual unlimited plan with no throttling.
And your point about "worst LTE coverage" -- what area are you talking about? I would guess not the markets that T-Mobile upgraded to wideband LTE within the past few months. Nationwide averages are meaningless, because there's so much geographic variation and coverage advantages in rural areas are largely negated by the fact that the vast majority of usage at any given time occurs in metro areas.
As far BS goes, these promo offers are just par for the course. T-Mobile separated the cost of the phone from the cost of service, and offered up a plan that met my exact usage needs with no grandfathered terms or confusing contracts or special limited time promos or locked devices. If that's BS, then I don't know what you'd call the other stuff getting pitched.
AT&T has a pretty fast network. I have both Verizon LTE and AT&T LTE devices and the AT&T are consistently faster. I have that 10gb (now 15gb) plan and the additional devices are so cheap that if you have the right mix of light and heavy users it is a good plan. With 6 devices it is cheaper then most prepaid plans that have full data speeds.
1) Worse LTE than Sprint who based WiMAX — remember them? — for way too long after the rigor morits was setting in?
2) I don't have an unlimited plan. I pay for 3GiB, which is typically about about 2x as much as I need, but now that I can tether without a $20 fee appended to my bill I have been using about 70% of my plan I travel and stay overnight.
Don't know if things have improved in the interim; but, before the merger with T-Mobile, Metro PCS actually had more customers in the SF Bay Area than Sprint because the network was so bad. And Sprint's insistence on keeping their phones locked in perpetuity pretty much eliminated them from consideration when I was shopping for a carrier last year.
Just in the last year since I went on T-Mobile, they have exempted music streaming from data caps and added free tethering. Whereas before I had 3-4 GB of data counted against the cap every month, I only have 1-1.5 GB counted in any given month after T-Mobile made music streaming unlimited.
Yup, and as we now know, you will be throttled down by 95% by Sprint when you get to well under 15GB. At least with my Verizon 15GB plan, also for $100, that doesn't happen. All companies that offer unlimited are doing dramatic throttling below some arbitrary number, usually well below 10GB.
Yeah, when you go over your data cap, Verizon charges overage fees to the tune of $10 for every 1 GB over (rounded up to the next whole number). I don't know about Sprint, but T-Mobile's top tier unlimited plan ($80 a month) is really unlimited with no throttling.
Feel the pain, AT&T and Verizon, as T-Mobile takes your business.
I went to T-mobile and they were markedly improved from where they had been in the past. Their temporary promotion has ended though and if they don't do something they will be at quite a disadvantage to this offer. They were offering 10 gigs for $100. That offer has expired and nothing has replaced it. So the same money gets you 1 gig per line for an effective 4 gigs for $100. You can bump up to 3 gigs per line for another $10 per line but that makes it 12 gigs for $140 vs 15 gigs for $160 on AT&T. I don't see that as a true enough competitive advantage.
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Originally Posted by SolipsismY
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Originally Posted by melgross
T-Mobile sucks big time. They throttle heavily too.
Maybe, but I haven't noticed that. I have noticed that their website is cleaner and faster than AT&T and Verizon, that they have LTE in my area, which AT&T didn't do until a few weeks before the iPhone 6 launch, their prices are better, and, most important, they don't BS the customer. i still have the same dead areas on the highway as I did with AT&T and didn't with Verizon. The worst part is when it says there are full bars with EDGE (2G) yet you seem to have no data or phone calls are pretty bad, but I don't think they're trying to be deceptive there, but more importantly it's not something I experience enough to give much consideration too.
I think this next quarter their pre-paid activation numbers are going best Verizon and they are already killing AT&T and Sprint.
T-mobile's numbers have been huge but I believe the main driver of that has ended. They will still pull some good numbers because they are a well run company but I do hope they find a good deal or promotion to keep up the growth. Their network is undergoing a full upgrade to LTE from EDGE in all the outer lying areas and they are right on the verge of passing Sprint. I'd hate to see their growth slow and this deal from AT&T could help blunt some of their gains.
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Originally Posted by AppleFanPro
Cell phone companies throw us table scraps and we're supposed to be overjoyed? I'll stick to my Sprint unlimited everything plan.
Sprint is a terrible provider and they've been bleeding money and subscribers for ages.
Actually, at least in NYC, Sprint coverage is great. I bought the iphone 6 plus using sprint easy pay, it was $0.00 down and you pay the cost of the phone over 2 years, the total I pay each month is $85. At first I didn't want to get a new phone with sprint because I thought there service was bad but the iphone 6 plus is much faster than the old iphone 5 I was using, I thought sprint had poor coverage but it must have been that the old iphone 5 sim card wasn't optimized to work well with the new sprint towers? I don't know but I'm happy with sprint. After two years my bill will be $50.00 a month for unlimited data / text with 400 minutes.
I went to T-mobile and they were markedly improved from where they had been in the past. Their temporary promotion has ended though and if they don't do something they will be at quite a disadvantage to this offer. They were offering 10 gigs for $100. That offer has expired and nothing has replaced it. So the same money gets you 1 gig per line for an effective 4 gigs for $100. You can bump up to 3 gigs per line for another $10 per line but that makes it 12 gigs for $140 vs 15 gigs for $160 on AT&T. I don't see that as a true enough competitive advantage.
T-mobile's numbers have been huge but I believe the main driver of that has ended. They will still pull some good numbers because they are a well run company but I do hope they find a good deal or promotion to keep up the growth. Their network is undergoing a full upgrade to LTE from EDGE in all the outer lying areas and they are right on the verge of passing Sprint. I'd hate to see their growth slow and this deal from AT&T could help blunt some of their gains.
But, that's the whole point. These are temporary promos. I don't see them moving the needle in any direction, other than limiting defections in the short-term. IMO, the ace that T-Mobile has is quite simple -- no overage charges. AT&T charges $15 per 1 GB over, and Verizon charges $10 to $15 per 1 GB over.
I don't think promos have fueled T-Mobile's growth spurt. I think the transparency of their plans, getting rid of contracts, aggressive improvements to the network, and freebies like unlimited music streaming and free tethering are real and substantive benefits for customers. These are not promotional gimmicks. They're actual changes that address issues that have long frustrated mobile customers. Something as simple as their test drive program goes to that whole notion of transparency. And consumers have responded in a big way.
There's so much gimmickry and purposeful confusion built into mobile plan pricing and how it ties into the device pricing. This is the kind of crap that steered me clear of smartphones altogether until last year. T-Mobile cleared the deck and made the terms simple and transparent. The other carriers seem content to try and come close on price, while keeping the terms and conditions opaque and confusing. IMO, as long as T-Mobile keeps things simple and continues addressing points of frustration, then their upward trajectory can continue.
I like tmo i had great experience with them. I'm on Verizon now, is good with a family plan. They treat us good and only pay like 70 a month per line with 30gs (took advantage of their promo, before that we had 18 plus 7 complementary gigs of data) service is good, very fee dead spots. if i ever have to switch tmo would be my choice
Same for me, I am over 1 year with T mobile and I won't go back. I have LTE tower like 1/4 mile from the home, 5 bars everywhere along major highways, 2g for calls in the woods is sufficient. Usually the dead spots are the same I had with ATT before. With WiFi calling enabled (the only carrier in US) I don't have a problem with phone signal at work anymore while all my colleagues have to go outside the building to make/receive calls..
ATT sucks big time, 0 support, arrogant and incompetent representatives.
My coworker's iPhone had SIM card error, she brought it to ATT. After 3 hours of testing, calling support, swapping SIMs and "trying everything possible and impossible" ATT tech guy stated: "It's faulty SIM card reader inside the phone. Your phone is out of warranty, you have to buy a new one."
It took me 1 hardwipe & restore to make it work again.
T-Mo is better, overall, for us. Cheaper and great in the cities and most places we travel to. Also, you can actually read and understand T-Mo bills.
AT&T is another one of those giant, messed up corporations that is full of smoke and mirrors and only eye on customer is on their wallet. We had them for years.
Simply love T-Mo because if I want to modify our plan, it's very simple and not confusing.
If you have billing issues or other issues, easy to call them up and fix things up.
We also have a daughter overseas, so we keep her number at $8 a month or so while she is away. It would be a lot more on AT&T because they charge more for an iPhone.
With T-Mo, cheap enough we could add a couple of iPhones and pay per month on those for the same rate at AT&T. We don't do that because I don't like any kind of debt or installment plan.
I have had all three in the past, T-Mobile, att and Verizon. I can tell you for a fact that t mobile is just as fast as the other two with half the nonsense.
1) Worse LTE than Sprint who based WiMAX — remember them? — for way too long after the rigor morits was setting in?
2) I don't have an unlimited plan. I pay for 3GiB, which is typically about about 2x as much as I need, but now that I can tether without a $20 fee appended to my bill I have been using about 70% of my plan I travel and stay overnight.
Sprint has made so many bad business decisions over the years, that it's amazing they're still around.
Well, then I see why you're not throttled. No one throttles with limited plans. But it seems they throttle at about 4.7GB in an unlimited plan.
Comments
You likely don't use enough data to see the throttling. But it's been shown that they do throttle their unlimited plans, as everyone else does. You're lucky with LTE, as they have the worst LTE coverage of the four.
And, yeah, they've been caught BSing their customers.
Of course "it's been shown" because T-Mobile tells you right up front how much 4G/LTE data you get every month before throttling kicks in. You're making it sound like they somehow hide the data caps from their customers. Technically, I have an unlimited plan, but T-Mobile always described it as a "5 GB 4G" plan. And unlike these grandfathered "unlimited" plans, T-Mobile offers an actual unlimited plan with no throttling.
And your point about "worst LTE coverage" -- what area are you talking about? I would guess not the markets that T-Mobile upgraded to wideband LTE within the past few months. Nationwide averages are meaningless, because there's so much geographic variation and coverage advantages in rural areas are largely negated by the fact that the vast majority of usage at any given time occurs in metro areas.
As far BS goes, these promo offers are just par for the course. T-Mobile separated the cost of the phone from the cost of service, and offered up a plan that met my exact usage needs with no grandfathered terms or confusing contracts or special limited time promos or locked devices. If that's BS, then I don't know what you'd call the other stuff getting pitched.
AT&T has a pretty fast network. I have both Verizon LTE and AT&T LTE devices and the AT&T are consistently faster. I have that 10gb (now 15gb) plan and the additional devices are so cheap that if you have the right mix of light and heavy users it is a good plan. With 6 devices it is cheaper then most prepaid plans that have full data speeds.
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1) Worse LTE than Sprint who based WiMAX — remember them? — for way too long after the rigor morits was setting in?
2) I don't have an unlimited plan. I pay for 3GiB, which is typically about about 2x as much as I need, but now that I can tether without a $20 fee appended to my bill I have been using about 70% of my plan I travel and stay overnight.
Don't know if things have improved in the interim; but, before the merger with T-Mobile, Metro PCS actually had more customers in the SF Bay Area than Sprint because the network was so bad. And Sprint's insistence on keeping their phones locked in perpetuity pretty much eliminated them from consideration when I was shopping for a carrier last year.
Just in the last year since I went on T-Mobile, they have exempted music streaming from data caps and added free tethering. Whereas before I had 3-4 GB of data counted against the cap every month, I only have 1-1.5 GB counted in any given month after T-Mobile made music streaming unlimited.
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Yup, and as we now know, you will be throttled down by 95% by Sprint when you get to well under 15GB. At least with my Verizon 15GB plan, also for $100, that doesn't happen. All companies that offer unlimited are doing dramatic throttling below some arbitrary number, usually well below 10GB.
Yeah, when you go over your data cap, Verizon charges overage fees to the tune of $10 for every 1 GB over (rounded up to the next whole number). I don't know about Sprint, but T-Mobile's top tier unlimited plan ($80 a month) is really unlimited with no throttling.
Feel the pain, AT&T and Verizon, as T-Mobile takes your business.
I went to T-mobile and they were markedly improved from where they had been in the past. Their temporary promotion has ended though and if they don't do something they will be at quite a disadvantage to this offer. They were offering 10 gigs for $100. That offer has expired and nothing has replaced it. So the same money gets you 1 gig per line for an effective 4 gigs for $100. You can bump up to 3 gigs per line for another $10 per line but that makes it 12 gigs for $140 vs 15 gigs for $160 on AT&T. I don't see that as a true enough competitive advantage.
T-Mobile sucks big time. They throttle heavily too.
Maybe, but I haven't noticed that. I have noticed that their website is cleaner and faster than AT&T and Verizon, that they have LTE in my area, which AT&T didn't do until a few weeks before the iPhone 6 launch, their prices are better, and, most important, they don't BS the customer. i still have the same dead areas on the highway as I did with AT&T and didn't with Verizon. The worst part is when it says there are full bars with EDGE (2G) yet you seem to have no data or phone calls are pretty bad, but I don't think they're trying to be deceptive there, but more importantly it's not something I experience enough to give much consideration too.
I think this next quarter their pre-paid activation numbers are going best Verizon and they are already killing AT&T and Sprint.
T-mobile's numbers have been huge but I believe the main driver of that has ended. They will still pull some good numbers because they are a well run company but I do hope they find a good deal or promotion to keep up the growth. Their network is undergoing a full upgrade to LTE from EDGE in all the outer lying areas and they are right on the verge of passing Sprint. I'd hate to see their growth slow and this deal from AT&T could help blunt some of their gains.
Cell phone companies throw us table scraps and we're supposed to be overjoyed? I'll stick to my Sprint unlimited everything plan.
Sprint is a terrible provider and they've been bleeding money and subscribers for ages.
I went to T-mobile and they were markedly improved from where they had been in the past. Their temporary promotion has ended though and if they don't do something they will be at quite a disadvantage to this offer. They were offering 10 gigs for $100. That offer has expired and nothing has replaced it. So the same money gets you 1 gig per line for an effective 4 gigs for $100. You can bump up to 3 gigs per line for another $10 per line but that makes it 12 gigs for $140 vs 15 gigs for $160 on AT&T. I don't see that as a true enough competitive advantage.
T-mobile's numbers have been huge but I believe the main driver of that has ended. They will still pull some good numbers because they are a well run company but I do hope they find a good deal or promotion to keep up the growth. Their network is undergoing a full upgrade to LTE from EDGE in all the outer lying areas and they are right on the verge of passing Sprint. I'd hate to see their growth slow and this deal from AT&T could help blunt some of their gains.
But, that's the whole point. These are temporary promos. I don't see them moving the needle in any direction, other than limiting defections in the short-term. IMO, the ace that T-Mobile has is quite simple -- no overage charges. AT&T charges $15 per 1 GB over, and Verizon charges $10 to $15 per 1 GB over.
I don't think promos have fueled T-Mobile's growth spurt. I think the transparency of their plans, getting rid of contracts, aggressive improvements to the network, and freebies like unlimited music streaming and free tethering are real and substantive benefits for customers. These are not promotional gimmicks. They're actual changes that address issues that have long frustrated mobile customers. Something as simple as their test drive program goes to that whole notion of transparency. And consumers have responded in a big way.
There's so much gimmickry and purposeful confusion built into mobile plan pricing and how it ties into the device pricing. This is the kind of crap that steered me clear of smartphones altogether until last year. T-Mobile cleared the deck and made the terms simple and transparent. The other carriers seem content to try and come close on price, while keeping the terms and conditions opaque and confusing. IMO, as long as T-Mobile keeps things simple and continues addressing points of frustration, then their upward trajectory can continue.
Same for me, I am over 1 year with T mobile and I won't go back. I have LTE tower like 1/4 mile from the home, 5 bars everywhere along major highways, 2g for calls in the woods is sufficient. Usually the dead spots are the same I had with ATT before. With WiFi calling enabled (the only carrier in US) I don't have a problem with phone signal at work anymore while all my colleagues have to go outside the building to make/receive calls..
ATT sucks big time, 0 support, arrogant and incompetent representatives.
My coworker's iPhone had SIM card error, she brought it to ATT. After 3 hours of testing, calling support, swapping SIMs and "trying everything possible and impossible" ATT tech guy stated: "It's faulty SIM card reader inside the phone. Your phone is out of warranty, you have to buy a new one."
It took me 1 hardwipe & restore to make it work again.
T-Mo is better, overall, for us. Cheaper and great in the cities and most places we travel to. Also, you can actually read and understand T-Mo bills.
AT&T is another one of those giant, messed up corporations that is full of smoke and mirrors and only eye on customer is on their wallet. We had them for years.
Simply love T-Mo because if I want to modify our plan, it's very simple and not confusing.
If you have billing issues or other issues, easy to call them up and fix things up.
We also have a daughter overseas, so we keep her number at $8 a month or so while she is away. It would be a lot more on AT&T because they charge more for an iPhone.
With T-Mo, cheap enough we could add a couple of iPhones and pay per month on those for the same rate at AT&T. We don't do that because I don't like any kind of debt or installment plan.
You can get all you can eat data on Three in the UK for $30 a month and they offer free roaming in the US.
I wonder if there's some clause that you can only roam for so many days in a year though!
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That was for the price of 15GB not 10
I'd love for that to continue to happen, if for no other reason than just to stick it to AT&T.
no it was 30 bucks more for double the data I did it 30 gigs for price of 15. They should have at least doubled the data for 10 gigs
I'm happy. We have 5 iPhones sharing 10 gb now getting 50% more data for the same price.
Competition is good!
Sprint has made so many bad business decisions over the years, that it's amazing they're still around.
Well, then I see why you're not throttled. No one throttles with limited plans. But it seems they throttle at about 4.7GB in an unlimited plan.