Slashing and axing - T-Mobile's new mobile data cap

There's been a lot written about T-Mobile and the changes being made to their data allowance plans. Words like 'slashing' and 'axing' have been used and it is clear the decision has caused a fair deal of controversy.

First, the facts: T-Mobile currently has mobile internet allowances of 1GB and 3GB depending on your contract; this is what they call 'unlimited', with a fair usage policy added on top. Both caps are to be scrapped and replaced with a significantly lower one, set at 500MB.

The company has also said that it will not charge customers for going over the cap, but rather customers who do so "will have file downloading restricted."

As a T-Mobile customer using an Android phone, I was somewhat concerned to see the company announce a change to their data allowance plan. When I signed up to my contract a few months ago I was specifically paying for ‘unlimited' internet as part of my package.

Whilst this is certainly a massive change to what was on the contract I signed, just how will it impact on my mobile internet usage?

The change from 'unlimited internet' (with a fair usage policy attached) to 500MB is quite a leap down; naturally I was a bit worried. So I decided to do some number crunching. T-Mobile provides itemised information on how much data you use as part of their online billing service. This displays each and every connection you make to their mobile internet service and also how much data was downloaded.

According to their data, so far in January (eleven days) I've used about 126MB, which means in a whole month I'll get through about 356MB. I regularly use Twitter and Facebook to keep in touch with friends and I browse the internet on my phone quite a bit. I also use it to send and receive emails.

Unlike a lot of people, I don't tend to watch videos on YouTube and I only download apps from the Android Marketplace on occasion. Put simply, for the majority, I use what T-Mobile define as "important services such as email and website browsing".

So I should be fine, and looking at my current data usage I will be - obviously, 356MB is less than 500MB. Is that a reason to be cheerful? Well, sort of.

There's still the gripe that a lot of people are feeling though; when I signed up to T-Mobile I thought I was getting ‘unlimited' internet, but it seems the mobile operator has redefined what that means. But what are your views? Be sure to let us know by commenting below or on our Facebook page.

For more on this, you can see the Computeractive news story here.