T-Mobile’s Unlimited Data is Actually Limited
T-Mobile launched their “Unlimited Nationwide 4G” data plan back in September, and as a heavy data user who doesn’t like slow-downs, this was perfect for me. I wanted to test the limits of the data, so I pushed and pushed any data I could on the phone and only got up around 10GB – far short of my 50GB goal.
When you have a T-Mobile data plan with 2, 5, or 10GB of the high-speed data, it will say “Unlimited” but when you’re on your account looking at your billing, it will specify how much high-speed data you have left. For my unlimited data plan, it’s just shown “Unlimited”. While checking my account online today, I noticed I’ve only used small amount of data, but I finally see a limit underneath.
Yep, that’s right – just under 10,000 GB of 4G data.
I average between 13 and 22Mbps down on T-mobile (Megabits, 1/8th of a Megabyte), so that’s just over 2.5MB/s. Say I get 24Mbps, or 3MB/s consistently, it would take me 948 consecutive hours, or 39.5 days of downloading to hit 10,000GB. For the 9769.4GB they have above, it would be just over 926 hours, or 38.6 days.
I think that pretty much covers it. In case you couldn’t tell, 10,000GB is effectively unlimited. I’m sure it’s either a glitch in the system or just how they represent unlimited, kind of like how AT&T shows unlimited minutes as ‘999999’ minutes.
