T-Mobile CEO Has No Idea What People Are Doing With 2 TB Of Mobile Data, Vows To Stop Them

(Patrick)

Heads up, mobile data hogs: T-Mobile is on to your tethering shenanigans and your testing the limits of what “unlimited data” means. In a blog post, CEO John Legere says that the company plans to go after its biggest “network abusers,” and it will begin today. What’s “abuse,” according to Legere? Using as much as two terabytes of data per month.

It’s hard to use that much data in a month with just a phone, but this all goes back to the users violating the terms and conditions of their accounts, which T-Mobile coincidentally declared war on about a year ago. They didn’t end up carrying out the plan last year, but this year the warnings and account downgrades are happening.

Smartphones can be used as mobile wifi hotspots, which is useful, say, when you’re trying to put up a blog post in the waiting room at the dentist. While T-Mobile only lets its users with unlimited accounts use about 7 gigabytes of data on their phones as mobile hotspots every month, there are ways around that limit, using apps designed for the purpose of illicit tethering.

There’s a difference between sneaking a desktop Web browsing session and whatever the heaviest users are up to, though, and Legere is threatening to check up on the top 3,000 data users nationwide. T-Mobile claims to have developed technology to find these users and stop them.

Will T-Mobile follow through this time? Will people who aren’t abusing the network be swept up in this hunt for the perpetrators of alleged network abuse? We’ll find out soon, maybe.

Stopping Network Abusers: An Open Letter to T-Mobile Customers [T-Mobile]