T-Mobile Makes Unlimited Web Quite Limited on G1 Phone

Only yesterday we got all excited about HTC and T-Mobile making the new Android-powered G1 phone really affordable with $179 price tag for the device purchase with a two-year contract and $25 or $35 for data plan that is required on top of the voice plan for the device. Basically we were told that $25 is for unlimited web usage plus 400 text messages while $35 is totally unlimited - both for messaging and web usage.

But mere hours after that we get to know that unlimited is not precisely unlimited for T-Mobile with 1 Gb cap in place for the G1 phone. The restriction that T-Mobile will apply to G1 users is as follows: once a user reaches 1 Gb during one month, the data throughput will be limited to 50 kbps or even slower until the end of this month.

Actually T-Mobile spokespeople claim that there are no caps for the device in the data plans but the fact remains: this information is still on the official G1 website and you can not avoid this fact and believe that the comments from spokespeople should outweigh written policy on the website itself.

It is quite understandable that T-Mobile may be uncomfortable about letting all the Google fans use its very new (and probably not perfectly stable) 3G network to download as much as they can. But if you have such restrictions in place for the device that is mostly appealing because of its internet capabilities, you should better make it perfectly clear to your users not to disappoint them with extremely low data speed once they hit the limit.

But even if T-Mobile uses “may be” instead of “will” when speaking about the possibility of having your speed limited after reaching 1 Gb, it is still disturbing enough - even if it is more of a safety measure for T-Mobile to better protect the new network.