T-Mobile have just announced that as from now, if a Pay As You Go (PAYG) user tops up with £10 of credit per month, as well as getting “unlimited” texts for life (or until they change the T&Cs again), users will now also get “unlimited” internet access.  This has been launched with statements like “customers only need to top up £10 a month to use the internet as much as they like, and it doesn’t eat in to their credit” and “enjoy unlimited free access to the mobile internet for life”.

Unfortunately, you then get the small print, hidden away, without asterisks, without warning, which says:

“A fair usage policy of 40 MB per day will apply to the unlimited internet offer. To get unlimited free internet and texts for life, customers need to join T-Mobile by 31^st January 2010. In order to keep receiving free texts and internet for life, customers need to top up just £10 each month.”

So, that’s very different then.  You only get 40MB per day, and you need to join T-Mobile within the next couple of months (fair enough), and they have re-iterated the requirement to regularly topup (again, fair enough).  However, here at UK Gadgeteer we are not happy about the actual service on offer…

Is this 40MB even more limited? T-Mobile state it’s only for accessing “the mobile internet”, so is accessing using applications ok? Is streaming music or video okay? They also quote it’s suitable for the new T-Mobile Pulse (an Android device, shown above) including “pre-loaded Google services”; I wonder as the Pulse has Google’s YouTube support pre-loaded, what would happen if a user went over the limit watching YouTube videos, which would seem in line with the marketing material…

The key point here is that although we fully support the provision of internet access automatically with PAYG TopUps (3UK give you 150Mb with every TopUp that lasts upto 90 days), at least others (such as 3UK) are honest about the limit and don’t hide it in the small print; if unlimited means 40Mb per day, then just be man enough to say that; after all 40MB a day is still a lot of data, but not enough to allow someone to “use the internet as much as they like”…

Ironically, in the two Press Releases we’ve seen talking about the “unlimited” texts, neither mentioned a fair use limit of any sort about the texts, so maybe, just maybe, that actually is truly unlimited (please don’t rely upon a lack of limit in a press release before using this service!)

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Gadgets, Not Unlimited. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.