T-Mobile Raises Data Throttling Limit To 50 GB A Month

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T-Mobile is raising its data throttling limit to 50 GB. The carrier will no longer reduce users’ Internet speed once they have used 32 GB of data in a given month.

Raising data throttling limit

With the reduction, only the top 1% of T-Mobile subscribers will see their speed reduced instead of 3%.

“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,” the company said.

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray said users will still be left with approximately 8 GB at the point where they begin seeing the effects of data throttling. Currently, At&T and Verizon have their data throttling limits at 22 GB.

Some sort of deprioritization limit is used by all the  mobile networks. All the data used up to this threshold is available at the maximum speed supported by the network. Once the threshold is hit, the speed is reduced and the subscriber is put at the bottom of the queue. This affects Internet speeds if a user is in a congested area.

“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 explains in a blog post. “But this impacts them only very rarely, like when there is a big line, and it resets every month.”

Earlier this month, T-Mobile reported that it had achieved a download speed of 1.175GBps on its LTE network using a Nokia 4.9G network powered by the Nokia Air Scale Base Station with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon  X20 LTE modem.

Trying hard to get an edge

It seems like T-Mobile is raining offers on customers to retain and add more users. Immediately after the launch of the new iPhones, the company came up with trade-in deals for them. The company announced that it would pay $300 to any customer who trades in an iPhone 6 or newer for an iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X. A 64GB iPhone X costs $999; thus, a $300 credit would come as a big relief.

T-Mobile is also offering three months of free cellular service for Apple Watch 3 series. Once the promotional offer is over, users can get unlimited talk, text and data for an extra $10 a month. Those who want to include an Apple Watch on their plan will have to go through T-Mobile’s Digits service; it’s the same service that allows phone numbers to migrate to other Internet-connected device, notes The Verge.

T-Mobile is doing everything it could to survive the ongoing price war in the telecom space. There were even reports recently that T-Mobile and Sprint might try to merge. T-Mobile CEO John Legere and Masayoshi Son, CEO of Sprint’s parent company SoftBank, are reportedly in the active negotiation phase for a possible all-stock merger. Under the current terms of the deal, T-Mobile’s German parent company, Deutsche Telekom, would reportedly have control, although nothing has been finalized.

If things move as expected, the deal would merge the third and fourth largest wireless carriers in the United States. Similar reports circulated in 2014 as well, but the telecom landscape in the United States was different from what it is now.

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