Greetings. After a chorus of rather skeptical public articles regarding T-Mobile's plans to severely speed throttle users of the new HTC G1 Google Android Phone who reached 1 GB of usage within a single billing cycle, T-Mobile has now removed the 1 GB throttle trigger language from their 3G information page.

The original language, as I earlier noted, was:

If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less. Your data session, plan, or service may be suspended, terminated, or restricted for significant roaming or if you use your service in a way that interferes with our network or ability to provide quality service to other users.

The new wording on that same information page:

To provide the best network experience for all of our customers we may temporarily reduce data throughput for a small fraction of customers who use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. Your data session, plan, or service may be suspended, terminated, or restricted for significant roaming or if you use your service in a way that interferes with our network or ability to provide quality service to other users.

So what appeared to be a rather hard limit to trigger throttling has been replaced with a hazier definition that seems to leave considerable wiggle room for adjustment and dealing with individual cases in a more appropriate manner. In particular, I'd anticipate that G1 users whose data usage is more spread out over the month rather than bunched up over short periods will be less likely to run into problems, even if (as will be rather easy to do) their usage exceeds 1 GB within a single billing cycle.

It will be interesting to see how T-Mobile manages this new policy in practice, but this does seem to remove a significant potential problem for early Android adopters.

--Lauren--

Blog Update (December 2, 2008): T-Mobile Likely to Establish 10 GB Data Cap