John Legere came out shooting in a blog post directed at T-Mobile network abusers who find creative ways to use data they don’t pay for. A small subset of users seems to have a unhealthy appetite for T-Mobile data some to the tune of two terabytes, which probably means they’re streaming movies. Legere isn’t all too happy this is going on and for good reason. Data theft costs the company and its users in both money and bandwidth. Here’s a little of what Legere had to say in his blog post.
This week, I am taking aim at a select group of individuals who have actually been stealing data from T-Mobile. If their activities are left unchecked their actions could eventually have a negative effect on the experience of honest T-Mobile customers. Not on my watch.
However, these violators are going out of their way with all kinds of workarounds to steal more LTE tethered data. 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. These aren’t naive amateurs; they are clever hackers who are willfully stealing for their own selfish gain. It’s a small group – 1/100 of a percent of our 59 million customers – but some of them are using as much as 2 terabytes (2,000GB!) of data in a 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 has already targeted 3,000 known data thieves and says the company will begin contacting them this morning to let them know that T-Mobile knows what they’re doing. This is a bold move by Legere as he will probably get some backlash from these and other users about data throttling. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
[button link=”http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/issues-insights-blog/stopping-network-abusers.htm” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: T-Mobile[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
