T-Mobile CEO John Legere made it known today in a blog post that the company will no longer tolerate those who "abuse" and "steal from" T-Mobile's "unlimited data" plans.
How can anyone steal data when it's supposed to be unlimited, you may ask? The core issue here is that unlimited data isn't exactly unlimited, whether we're talking about T-Mobile or some other carrier that promises the same thing.
In reality, companies have certain unspecified thresholds in their minds, and when they're passed by some customers, the action is then qualified as an "abuse" or "stealing," in a rather non-transparent way. The companies never put a number on how much is "enough" but started banning wireless users anyway because they passed the secret limit in their unlimited data plans.
However, carriers don't take the only action that can truly stop these abuses, which is ending the "unlimited" data plans that never were, and giving customers exactly as much as they think their networks will handle, whether that's 2 GB, 10 GB or 100 GB.
The only problem with this is that "unlimited" sounds better than "unlimited, sort of, to a point" in advertising campaigns.
The second issue in this story is that wireless carriers, including T-Mobile, like to consider tethered data as different from regular mobile data. In its "unlimited data plan," T-Mobile includes 7 GB of "free" tethering data at regular high speeds, but after that, the data transfer speeds are lowered significantly.
In other words, you may watch Netflix non-stop on your phone the whole month, but you can only watch 7 GB's worth (a few movies) when the phone is tethered to your laptop. At least that's how it's supposed to work in theory. In practice, T-Mobile will likely also penalize those who pass the 21 GB "regular speed limit" from its unlimited data plan for mobile.
Legere said that there are over 3,000 individuals who currently qualify as "thieves," "abusers" and even "hackers" of this tethering data, because they are using apps that hide their tethering activity. That allows them to continue to use tethering data at regular speeds, even after the allotted 7 GB has been used.
However, this sort of thing likely wouldn't be possible if T-Mobile and other carriers were more transparent and direct with their real limits for mobile data usage instead of only pretending the data is unlimited and then punishing users for using "too much" of that data.
T-Mobile's CEO said the company will begin going after the abusers, starting today.
