The FCC and T-Mobile have struck a deal that’ll see T-Mo pay $48 million because of its unlimited data plans.
In March 2015, the FCC began investigating T-Mobile over its deprioritization of heavy unlimited plan users and how the carrier explained its deprioritization policy. During its investigation, the FCC says that it got hundreds of complaints from T-Mobile customers who were unhappy with T-Mo’s deprioritization policy and felt that they weren’t getting the unlimited data plan that was being advertised.
The FCC says that before June 2015, T-Mobile did not sufficiently explain its deprioritization policy to customers. The FCC explains that T-Mo didn’t explicitly identify the threshold that a customer would have to cross before they’d be deprioritized, nor did T-Mobile cover the speed reduction that a deprioritized customer could experience.
T-Mobile has agreed to do the following as a result of the FCC’s investigation:
- Update disclosures for its deprioritization, including on T-Mobile and MetroPCS websites
- Clearly explain deprioritization in all marketing materials for unlimited data plans or stop using the word “unlimited” to describe plans that are subject to deprioritization
- Will not misrepresent performance of unlimited data plan
- Provide direct and individual notification to a customer when they’re nearing the deprioritization threshold
- Spend at least $35.5 million on benefits to T-Mobile and MetroPCS unlimited data plan customers, including offering 20 percent discount (up to $20) on an accessory and 4GB of additional data for mobile internet customers
- Spend at least $5 million on a program that’ll provide students of low-income schools with free devices and service
- Pay a $7.5 million civil penalty
T-Mobile’s current deprioritization policy applies to customers who use more than 26GB of data a month. If you fall into that group, your data use will be prioritized below other customers, which means that your data speeds could be slowed “at locations where there are competing customer demands for network resources.”
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