It's Official: T-Mobile Places "soft" Limits on Their UNlimited Plans

Well folks, we've talked about deprioritization before on this site and here we go again.  Now, we have the official word that T-Mobile plainly states, in small print, that they do in fact, affect your ability to access high speed internet on their network, even if you are on the UNLIMITED plan. 

So from now on, please think of your UNlimited plan as a 21GB plan, until the next billing cycle kicks in, at least. 

I personally subscribe to the idea that this is a temporary problem; and I'll keep beating that horse until it's dead.  As I commented on tmonews's site:

This is really about the threshold of each tower, not necessarily a network-wide specific approach. Now that I understand de-prioritization more, I have come to the conclusion that the only solution is to add more (smaller, neighborhood) towers, even if less powerful to ease the congestion. Too, if the speed were increased, the majority of the smartphones in the area would be on the network for shorter periods of time as they would get done with their packet downloads much quicker, thus easing network congestion. Personally, I would not buy three busses that hold 30 passengers each and sell 100 tickets. It does not make sense. Unless the passengers are picked up along the way and I know that customers will be de-boarding in between cities. I would appreciate it if T-Mobile allowed for everyone to have a 4MB speed experience, rather than some using the network at 30MBps vs a de-prioritized person using it at less than 1MBps. I would not complain if I had at least 4MBps if I were to be de-prioritized. The fact of the matter is that the deployment of more lowband and wideband bandwidth will address this issue and de-prioritization will slowly be a thing of the past as 5G technologies are adopted. Frankly, I am amazed that T-Mo is not agressively persuing LTE-A at this time. The only other solution, as a suggestion would be to set your phone to connect ONLY to 4G, which generally gives you much better speeds than trying to remain on a 4G LTE connection.

Some who signed up for the unlimited program are screaming, "Foul!"  Well, not being under contract kind of voids the statement, "that's not what I signed up for", frankly. Not that I agree with measures taken, I am just saying that T-Mobile is not under contract to offer you anything more than what their monthly fine print reads. That was a savvy business move by T-Mobile to give themselves flexibility to deal with network issues, knowing that they would likely have higher-than-ever network traffic to deal with. I believe that once more 4GLTE wideband and lowband is deployed and more people get the phones that ride on this network, there will be less network issues as more towers will more equally distribute data, minimizing individual towers that have to cover much larger coverage areas. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has to do what T-Mobile has to do to deal with network congestion issues. At least we know they care and are working on the issue to extend unlimited to as many people as possible. Believe me, if Legere was able to offer unlimited to EVERYONE who joined, he would. It will take some time AND cooperation by the FCC to set aside more than just 30MHz low-band spectrum for T-Mo and the other smaller companies so that AT&T and Verizon don't hog it all up with their almost bottomless pockets. IF the FCC rules in favor of T-Mobile, Legere's dream of offering TRULY unlimited data will finally come true. T-Mobile will be in a much better position to make it a sustainable move. That is why, knowing the incertainty of the FCC's decision, Legere promised unlimited passengers at least two more years of truly unlimited data. If the FCC sides with T-Mo and other smaller companies to strengthen competition, you will see T-Mobile offer more of everything and the tide will turn in T-Mobile's favor, propelling it to the #1 spot in the US Wireless Market. John Legere, will then be the United States' first Billionaire CEO (ok, that was a little bit of a stretch... hehe he) ;-)