FCC Fake Fines T-Moble $48 Million
When is $48 million not $48 million? When it is a FCC fine. T-Mobile was fined $48 million today by the FCC for misleading customers about its unlimited data plans. As it turns out, T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan was actually a 17 GB per month plan. After that the company “de-prioritized” the customer’s traffic making it so slow as to be pretty much unusable. Most unlimited plans work this way, of course, because unlimited isn’t really feasible. The reality is that there is only so much data a “normal” user would use in the course of a month, and racking up 17 GB would require some pretty heavy effort. This is a problem of the cell phone carriers own making. They market against each other in such a way that customers now believe that they must have unlimited data even though many of them don’t use anywhere near that much. So now, carriers work overtime to shout UNLIMITED whenever possible, and then hide actual limits in the fine print. In this case, T-Mobile even tried to not be honest in the fine print, and that’s when the FCC struck with its huge fine, except… It’s Not Really $48 Million The …