T-Mobile Exempts Speed Tests From Usage Caps → Re: The opposite tact of AT&T

This also lets them play the game of pointing the finger at "someone else" for slow speeds, just like Verizon is trying to do now with Netflix. Clearwire did something similar back before they admitted they actively throttled (and lost a class action lawsuit, the year before SCOTUS said the arbitration-only clauses in contracts were legal, thus outlawing any future class action lawsuits...). It's a pretty bad practice to have a special mode to just show favorable speedtests for the carrier while they're actively throttling all other applications. I'm surprised anyone is applauding it. It's reasonable to exempt the data from counting towards the cap, but they shouldn't be specifically doctoring the data so that the speedtests are Faster than the user has access to. The speedtests should show the current throttling limit they have in place on the user, if any.

With Clearwire, every 20-30 minutes it would reset the throttle and you'd have 30seconds-afewminutes (or a few MB) of data at Full Speed. Then it would throttle to 0.05MBps. If you called their tech support, they wouldn't admit management or throttling but they'd have you reset the modem, wait, turn it back on -- and of course the speedtest then was full speed. About 1 minute after the call was over, the speed would drop back to 0.05MBps.

With this new policy in place, it's very painful to determine to what speed they're throttling you to. Instead, your applications will just stop working properly and you'll complain to the application providers. And that's their primary goal.

But on T-Mobile, once you get throttled, the Speedtests and music apps and everything else will be throttled. They just don't get you to the point of being throttled in the first place. As long as your music service of choice is one of the ones on their list, they have now taken the two biggest sources of data consumption off of the table, so it will be basically impossible to hit even a 500MB cap...

I think you missed the point of the original post, in that T-Mo has un-throttled Ookla's speedtest.net specifically not to show throttled speeds. Read their press release wording:

The Ookla Speedtest.net application is designed to measure true network speed--not show that a customer has exceeded their high-speed data bucket.

...But that said:Are you a troll?

Yeah, I didn't read it right before. I didn't realize that they are also un-throttling it.

I'm not trolling. Maybe basically impossible is too strong of a word, but once you take out Speedtest.net and streaming music, what's left? Web pages, email, and apps. So basically not much in terms of data usage, so you could easily work with 500MB of data or 1GB or whatever the new minimum plan is, and for all practical purposes have unlimited, even with very heavy use.

There's still porn and YouTube and other video streaming

Facebook and its games. Youtube. Stuff like that can eat up bandwidth in a hurry.

Video sucks on a cell phone anyways. And who streams porn on their phone?Facebook doesn't use much. YouTube for a couple of short clips now and then isn't going to use that much.