T-Mobile on Wednesday made its next big move to shake up the wireless world by announcing a new cheap $40 wireless plan that offered unlimited voice and text along with 500MB of LTE data per month. The big selling point of this new plan is that, unlike Verizon and AT&T, T-Mobile won’t charge you any data overage fees if you go over your monthly allotment. However, there’s a big asterisk here that anyone who’s interested in subscribing to the plan should know about before taking the plunge.
Unlike other capped T-Mobile plans that throttle your data connection down to 2G speeds if you exceed your monthly limit, this new plan implements a hard data cap so that if you go over 500MB of LTE data in a given month, you’ll be cut off from mobile data — period. T-Mobile says that if you run out of data on this plan and want to buy more before the start of the next month, you can buy a one-day pass that will give 500MB of new LTE data on the network for $5 or a one-week pass that will give you 1GB for $10.
We bring this up because T-Mobile hasn’t yet made this explicitly clear anywhere on its Simple Starter promotion website. Earlier in the day, the website said that T-Mobile would throttle your speeds down to 2G if you exceeded your cap, although this claim has now been removed. It’s entirely possible that T-Mobile is planning to update the page with the correct information on what happens if you go over your monthly allotment shortly.
