T-Mobile gave birth to the concept of throttling data speed instead of charging users overages when they surpassed their monthly data limit. T-Mobile confirmed today that it will be changing its tone slightly. The company’s low-end data plan will now come with a hard limit of 200MB, and will charge $0.10 per MB after that.
T-Mobile isn’t giving its customers much time to react to the news. The change will be taking place on August 14, so if you are a T-Mobile user make sure to watch your bill this month. The company said that it will warn users when they reach 90 percent of their monthly data quota, and again when they reach the 200MB limit. Once customers reach the limit they will be offered to be moved into a higher data plan. It seems as though T-Mobile is trying to move all of these discount users up to a slightly more expensive data plan as quickly as possible.
As of right now this change is only taking place on T-Mobile’s cheapest plan, and the other throttled unlimited plans will remain intact for the time being. It is unclear if T-Mobile plans to make the same changes to its other data plans. It will be very interesting to see if there is any more news out of T-Mobile on this subject.
It would be nearly impossible to write this article without bringing up AT&T who is trying to buy T-Mobile. AT&T recently announced they will be throttling its grandfathered unlimited plan users. Right after the purchase was announced we predicted that this would mean the death of T-Mobile’s unlimited plans. It looks as though that prediction might come true even before the buy-out is complete.
