I've just been throttled!

[brad15]

I wish the FCC would establish a minimum speed that has to be offered after throttle. To suck customers in with unlimited usage to only throttle them to a point they cant use it is unfair.

Sent from my HTC Incredible S using HowardForums

It's still way better than $10 per gig overages, honestly i've tried to hit 5GB in a month and cant even when using slacker on an almost daily basis and occasional tethering (the most i've been able to do was ~4.2GB)

5GB is completely fair, and if you go over it you do have the option to pay an extra $30 and get 10GB if you really need that much data and speed to go with it, it still works out to $6 per GB and is cheaper than both AT&T and Verizon

[ja5219]

More proof, Not my screenshot but just sharing



Here's the reddit post.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comm..._this_morning/

Like i said, they had a good thing going.. something to offer better than the competitor but those speeds are just useless.

[i0wnj00]

7) So, how is the overall usability now that the speeds are so slow?

Answer: Well, to give you an idea, it's quite a pain. TuneIn Radio is buffering a lot and YouTube is like that Italian guy from NYC saying "Forget about it!"

Ouch....I use TuneIn on both my BB and Android devices.
Even after AT&T throttles me down at 3 GB at least I can still play a 128 kb/sec audio feed without any issues at all barring network/internet/server congestion. I'm actually surprised T-Mobile significantly drops the speed after the data allocated for "high speed" has been reached. Even though I have been moaning and complaining about the throttling it turns out that AT&T ends up being more generous with the throttle speed.

At least AT&T changed it.
Back then when the throttling was introduced it was just as bad as T-Mobile, but AT&T lightened up a bit and upped the speed to something more usable for at streaming audio.

[Scottish Skyedance]

Wirelessly posted (Samsung Galaxy Nexus: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16)

Perhaps T-Mobile simply shuts down internet and MMS access after the quota used up?

[mikethaler]

I wish the FCC would establish a minimum speed that has to be offered after throttle. To suck customers in with unlimited usage to only throttle them to a point they cant use it is unfair.

Sent from my HTC Incredible S using HowardForums

I would say throttling is better than a complete shut down.

They should offer to let you run over (should you choose) at $8/GB. Like paying for extra minutes when you run over your plan minutes.
Even land based data (internet) has limits. Comcast has a 250G limit for home service. I don't know if you have the option to buy more.

Why should someone who abuses the system not be cut off (or pay more for more)?

[jet1000]

I would say throttling is better than a complete shut down.

Unfortunately, the speeds that T-Mobile gives you during the throttle make the data connection completely worthless (as evidenced by recent speed tests.)

Other companies at least provide throttled speeds that permit some basic web access and even audio streaming. T-Mobile was the first to throttle their unlimited data plans and they continue to sell unlimited data plans when they're really very limited. If they're going to reduce the speeds that low, they should just put a hard cap on the plans and stop the nonsense.

[fratermus]

Other companies at least provide throttled speeds that permit some basic web access and even audio streaming. T-Mobile was the first to throttle their unlimited data plans and they continue to sell unlimited data plans when they're really very limited. If they're going to reduce the speeds that low, they should just put a hard cap on the plans and stop the nonsense.

I disagree. The throttle rates work ok for syncing data from the smartphone to Google. Email, contacts, Google Voice texts, etc.
A user doesn't have to stream media and up/download big files to have a usable smartphone.

[ricortes]

I just switched/added T-Mobile so still running things through my head. Thanks all for the posts and data, helps.

Rough calculations, 5 gig/month with an average song being about 4 minutes and 4 M bytes<MP3?> => 5,000,000,000/4,000,000 or 1250 songs per month before you get throttled. 1250 songs @ 4 minutes/song => 5,000 minutes or 83 hours/30 days or 2.8 hours/day of listing to streaming music. It does seem to call for buying content or saving it locally. A lot of stations are on a rotation so downloading the same song every 6 hours or so seems like a waste.

But YEAH! I pay the extra $15/month to use my cell as a Wifi hot spot in my home. Even with two computers updating Windows and IMHO a fair amount of web use I am under my limit. As petty as this may sound, I try to only eat in restaurants with Wifi. I wish there was no throttling but I can see where a ton of people would be providing APs on the cheap just to get the extra business. Plenty of people seem to literally live at local APs like McDonald's. There is one leech who runs several blogs for him and his family using free blog space and internet access from McDonald's.

Rick

[JamesMac]

Unfortunately, the speeds that T-Mobile gives you during the throttle make the data connection completely worthless (as evidenced by recent speed tests.)

I must agree with you.

And to make a point that is not proven on the speedtests, the connection actually times out A LOT. It's been months since I've been throttled, but I recall the data connection being completely unresponsive every 5 minutes. I feel like it's waterboarding with data. T-Mobile needs to lighten up a bit on the throttling.

[reuthermonkey]

I just switched/added T-Mobile so still running things through my head. Thanks all for the posts and data, helps.

Rough calculations, 5 gig/month with an average song being about 4 minutes and 4 M bytes<MP3?> => 5,000,000,000/4,000,000 or 1250 songs per month before you get throttled. 1250 songs @ 4 minutes/song => 5,000 minutes or 83 hours/30 days or 2.8 hours/day of listing to streaming music. It does seem to call for buying content or saving it locally. A lot of stations are on a rotation so downloading the same song every 6 hours or so seems like a waste.

Your calculations are actually off, because streaming radio only uses 32kbps AAC by default, rather than 128-192kbps MP3. In other words, a 4megabyte MP3 is only actually about 1MB streamed. So at 5GB, you can get about 10 hours a day of streaming radio, and that's not even including (as you mentioned) the song caching done by most streaming stations, wifi usage, etc.

I've hit the 5GB cap multiple times, and when I wasn't tethering, it really did take a lot of effort to hit the cap.

[Skuzz]

Your calculations are actually off, because streaming radio only uses 32kbps AAC by default, rather than 128-192kbps MP3. In other words, a 4megabyte MP3 is only actually about 1MB streamed. So at 5GB, you can get about 10 hours a day of streaming radio, and that's not even including (as you mentioned) the song caching done by most streaming stations, wifi usage, etc.

I've hit the 5GB cap multiple times, and when I wasn't tethering, it really did take a lot of effort to hit the cap.

Your calculations are wrong actually, streaming radio is whatever bit rate you choose on X service. For example, the service I use defaults to 64kbps AAC, I run it at 128kbps AAC or 256kbps MP3 to get better audio quality. Some other services I listen to run at 192kbps, 160kbps, etc. 32kbps was maybe good enough audio quality back when class 6 EDGE devices were the norm, but today there is absolutely no reason to listen to crap audio when we have multi-megabit pipes.

128kbps = 16kbytes/sec x 3600 secs in an hour = 57,600kbytes/hr or 56.25Mbytes/hr. Figure your 10 hours a day = 562.5Mbytes/day. 5 days a week, 2812.5Mbytes a week, 4 weeks in a month, 11,250Mbytes, and that's just listening to music. That isn't counting browsing, email, IM, app updates, or anything else.

[Skuzz]

I disagree. The throttle rates work ok for syncing data from the smartphone to Google. Email, contacts, Google Voice texts, etc.
A user doesn't have to stream media and up/download big files to have a usable smartphone.

Have you actually tried the throttle rates? They're so bad BlackBerry Messenger doesn't even reliably send messages. That same BlackBerry actually on a GPRS network will work fine with BBM, nice and snappy since it's low-bandwidth text stuff.

It isn't so much the data rates, it is the way they timeout connections faster. Android Market won't load all assets, web pages will be missing images and such, it looks as if they not only throttle the speed, they also throttle the number of connections the handset is allowed to open at once. When you attempt to send a text-only e-mail message, the message will keep timing out and you have to keep hitting retry. If you have an Android or BlackBerry phone that runs any background applications, they will start randomly timing out and not working.

I would understand throttling to EDGE speeds, or even maybe this GPRS crap without the #-of-sessions limitation, but combining the multiple methods they use to throttle doesn't make you "unlimited but slow" - it makes it "unusable" for anything. Reliability goes into the crapper.

I'm going to try and slam myself back into the throttling wall near the end of my next billing cycle and do some more analysis to find out what else they might be doing to make it so absolutely unusable.

[jarrodpd]

I would say throttling is better than a complete shut down.

They should offer to let you run over (should you choose) at $8/GB. Like paying for extra minutes when you run over your plan minutes.
Even land based data (internet) has limits. Comcast has a 250G limit for home service. I don't know if you have the option to buy more.

Why should someone who abuses the system not be cut off (or pay more for more)?

Comcast just recently turned off their data cap for consumer based internet. Luckily when they apply the 300Gb cap I won't be affected because I'm on business grade internet through them.

[jarrodpd]

8) Does T-Mobile notify you when you're close to reaching your data cap?

Answer: They sure do. When I reached 4 GB, I got a text from them saying "You have used 4.0 of the 5 GB included in your plan at up to 4G speeds (if on a capable device). Dial #WEB# to check your balance any time."

Something that is weird is when I type that code in to my iPhone it says X of Unlimited and sometimes the my account things will mess up and just say unlimited instead of 5Gb.

[TheCellphoneGuy]

Something that is weird is when I type that code in to my iPhone it says X of Unlimited and sometimes the my account things will mess up and just say unlimited instead of 5Gb.

Mine phone just says how much data I used and it doesn't say unlimited.



I believe that it doesn't say "x amount out of 5GB used", because data on this plan is unlimited, yes it's painfully slow after 5GB, but it's still unlimited.

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