Good news for T-Mobile customers: the self-proclaimed “un-carrier” is raising its throttling limit.
Right now, T-Mobile may reduce your internet speeds after you’ve already consumed 32GB of data in a given month. Starting tomorrow, the company is increasing that threshold to 50GB.
With this change, only the top 1 percent of T-Mobile data users will see their speeds decline, instead of the top 3 percent, T-Mobile said. “To put it in context, you could stream a full 2 hours of Netflix every single day — that’s 30 SD movies — and never even reach that point,” T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray wrote in a blog post. “You’d still have roughly 8GB to go.”
Verizon and AT&T throttle users after 22GB; the move is intended to ensure that a small number of data hogs don’t bog down the network.
T-Mobile said it will only reduce a user’s speeds after they have already used 50GB of data in a given month, and they are in an area experiencing congestion.
“When T-Mobile customers who use the most data hit these prioritization points during the month, they get in line behind other customers who have used less data and may experience reduced speeds,” the company explained. “But this impacts them only very rarely, like when there is a big line, and it resets every month.”
T-Mobile, for the record, denies that it throttles users at all.
“Prioritization is a traffic management tool to help ensure everyone has a great experience,” T-Mobile said in a statement to PCMag. “Throttling is different — it limits speed constantly, while prioritization simply puts the heaviest users at the end of the line, and they may only notice slightly slower speeds in a time of high network demand.”
We’ll have to agree to disagree with T-Mobile on that because if you “notice slightly slower speeds” — that’s throttling, regardless of when it happens.
Vernacular debates aside, this is a welcome change and it comes after T-Mobile last week started giving away Netflix subscriptions to many of its subscribers.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 8 launches this Friday and carriers are pulling out all the stops for Apple’s new handset. Verizon today launched an augmented reality scavenger hunt on Snapchat offering the chance to win one of 256 iPhone 8 handsets before they become available to the public. The scavenger hunt takes place today through Friday in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, and Atlanta. Each day, eight people in the eight cities will win iPhones; head here for complete details.
Plus, Sprint yesterday announced a promotion offering new customers a free 64GB iPhone 8 when they trade in one of five eligible handsets—an iPhone 7, 7 Plus, Galaxy S8, S8 Plus, or Note 8—and opt for the company’s Flex lease payment plan.