I went to Europe with a friend a few months ago. I'm on Verizon and she's on T-Mobile. Her phone was painfully slow compared to Verizon. I was wondering why it was so slow since she was on the same LTE network as me. I read the fine print and never knew T-Mobile throttles your speed when you are using your phone overseas. Verizon doesn't do that. I do like what T-Mobile has done for the industry though.
Reading up on this, it looks like T-Mobile, by default, gives free (and unlimited) data/texts to its customers that travel to Europe. To your point, data is throttled to 128kbps. But then again, it's free... and unlimited. If you need faster data, they do sell an add-on that you can put on your plan. That's not unlimited.
Looks like Verizon charges $10/day for people to use their normal voice/data/text plan while in Europe. The $2/day mentioned a few posts up seems to only cover Canada and Mexico. But you get full data speeds and voice.
Both offerings have their merits, IMO, and are a lottttttttt better than what was offered just a few years ago!
Verizon must have changed the price. I only paid $2 a day while I was in Europe. Yep, there was really nothing years ago until T-Mobile came out with theirs. One time in France, I got lost so I had to turn data back on my phone and used it probably for like 5 minutes. It ended up costing me like $30 for the few minutes I used to look up something on Apple Maps. The international data rates used to be extremely outrageous.
That is simply not true! Look up NVNO! I have been on Straight Talk since iPhone 4 never had a problem!
Lots of people have looked this up, and I haven't seen where anyone has found any definitive information, one way or the other. MVNO contract terms with carriers seem to be pretty private.
But to me, it's hard to believe that any of the Big Four wireless carriers wouldn't de-prioritize MVNO customer traffic in situations where a tower has hit capacity, giving the Big Four (i.e. full-price) customers first dibs at the resources.
I'm guessing, at least with Verizon, they don't have many towers that ever hit capacity. IIRC, Verizon's ToS for unlimited data was that it gets throttled (after a certain point) on towers that were at capacity, and it seems like nobody every experienced that.
A situation like the one you are trying to describe can occur at a big event like a concert or a festival and such, towers do get oversaturated. Which is a unique situation! If net neutrality rules applied in the telecommunication sector, then I doubt they throttle MVNO and if they do, it's only according to a specific contract rule. Still, my point is you get more for your $ with MVNO!
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http://www.tmonews.com/2013/02/t-mobile-confirms-priority-network-management-with-gosmart-mobile-launch/