Good news for T-Mobile customers: It looks like those rumors of an increased deprioritization threshold were true.
T-Mobile today confirmed that it will increase its deprioritization threshold from 32GB to 50GB. The increase will take effect tomorrow, September 20th.
What this means is that once a customer uses 50GB of data in a single billing cycle, their data usage will be prioritized behind other customers. When these deprioritized customers are in an area where the network is congested, they may experience slowed speeds. This deprioritization will reset at the start of the next billing cycle.
T-Mobile’s deprioritization threshold is now considerably higher than its competition. Sprint’s threshold is at 23GB of data usage in a month, while both AT&T and Verizon’s thresholds are at 22GB.
While I’m sure many customers would prefer there be no deprioritization at all, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon. T-Mobile uses this network management to ensure that the heaviest data users don’t bog down the network for other customers on the network. The good news is that T-Mo estimates that only 1 percent of data users consume 50GB of data or more each month, so most customers won’t have to worry about having their usage deprioritized.
