T-Mobile Targets Tethering Thieves In TOS Crackdown
Aug 31, 2015, 7:13 AM by Eric M. Zeman
T-Mobile is today taking action against a small percentage of customers abusing the mobile hotspot feature by enforcing its terms of service. T-Mobile customers who sign up for unlimited smartphone data plans are given 7GB of data allotted specifically for mobile hotspot use. Users who exceed that 7GB tethering cap experience reduced speeds for the remainder of the billing cycle. According to T-Mobile, some users are hiding their tethering activity to get around the limit and consuming far more than the allowed 7GB. "These violators are going out of their way with all kinds of workarounds to steal more LTE tethered data," said T-Mobile CEO John Legere. "They’re downloading apps that hide their tether usage, rooting their phones, writing code to mask their activity, etc. They are 'hacking' the system to swipe high-speed tethered data. These aren't naive amateurs; they are clever hackers who are willfully stealing for their own selfish gain. It's a small group, but some of them are using as much as 2 terabytes (2,000GB!) of data in a month." Legere said T-Mobile is initially targeting about 3,000 customers. Beginning today, T-Mobile will notify this group of users about their terms-of-service violations with a warning. Those who don't alter their tethering usage will be dropped down to T-Mobile's entry-level plan. T-Mobile says the move is meant to help protect its network for all users.
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