A lot of brands know that wordings of your promos and features need to be carefully worded in a way that it will not bite you in the behind someday. T-Mobile probably wishes that they could now turn back time as the FCC has issued a $48 million fine against them for the wording of the restriction disclosures in their unlimited data feature. Several subscribers complained about their carrier’s (and MetroPCS subscribers too) about the “misleading information” they were getting, prompting the investigation from the FCC.
The findings of the investigation concluded that the customers expected more than the high-speed data that they actually received because T-Mobile did not disclose appropriately some caveats and restrictions about the unlimited data feature that subscribers availed of. When users thought they were receiving unlimited high-speed data, in reality the carrier was actually throttling them to lower speeds when the congestion on their network becomes high. However, they did not properly inform the users of this, except when complaints started rolling in.
The $48 million fine is a “financial commitment” that will be broken down into the $7.5M as the actual fine. The $35.5 million will go to consumer benefits offered to subscribers, either as 4GB of free, extra mobile data or a discount of up to $20 of any of the accessories they offer at their online store. The remaining $5M will go to providing free devices to schools in regions with low-income to help students do their homework. Also part of this would be to provide reduced cost and low cost broadband to schools and families.
There is no news yet whether T-Mobile will appeal this fine and defend their “Top 3 Percent Policy” which basically refers to throttling extremely heavy data users. This case is one of the reasons why carriers now have opted not to offer “unlimited data” to their subscribers.
VIA: SlashGear
Because FCC fines should definitely be going to school districts…
Really?! People just don’t read fine print. Or even print slightly smaller that the word “Unlimited”. I clearly understood with only a few min of looking at their website of the pro and cons of their new plan. (I will stick to my pre-plan Simple Choice thanks.) Having to pay to more on top of plan for hd video,or tethering speeds to be more than 256k..no thanks. And “Unlimited” is already there in all their plans, it just means after your “high speed allotment” is up, u get throttled to 128k. (which is pretty much useless!) This new plan….you have no allotment, but they are free to throttle you whenever their is “heavy network activity”…so its a gamble. Of course, even “Unlimited plans” u automatically get throttled after a certain usage (20gb?). Many home ISP’s are doing throttling and data caps now. So stupid.
Whats happens in there? We are very interested to know the main cause for investigation and to do fine of them. I hope it should be make aware of others people.