CEO John Legere says some customers with unlimited data plans are abusing policy related to tethering devices
Apparently some users are actively subverting T-Mobile US’ policy regarding use of tethering devices by customers with unlimited data plans. And T-Mobile US CEO John Legere said of the abuse: “Not on my watch,” in an Aug. 30 blog post.
In a nutshell, Legere said customers buy the unlimited LTE plan, which includes a fixed amount of LTE for tethering, or using the phone as a hot spot.
“If customers hit that high-speed tethering limit, those tethering speeds slow down,” Legere said. “If a customer needs more LTE tethering, they can add-on more. Simple.”
But it looks like some customers – 1/100 of a 1% of 59 million customers, according to the company – are abusing the system.
“These violators are going out of their way with all kinds of workarounds to steal more LTE tethered data,” the carrier noted. “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.”
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Legere said some of the so-called network abusers use as much as 2,000 gigabytes in one month.
“I’m not sure what they are doing with it – stealing wireless access for their entire business, powering a small cloud service, providing broadband to a small city, mining for bitcoin – but I really don’t care,” Legere said. “I’m not in this business to play data cop.”
But Legere said the company would begin “going after every thief, and I am starting with the 3,000 users who know exactly what they are doing. The offenders start hearing from us tomorrow. No more abuse and no risk to the rest of our customers’ experience. It’s over.”
In additional to the blog post, Legere also took to Periscope to share some of his thoughts regarding data abuse.