Legal News

When is unlimited not unlimited? When it?s an unlimited data plan from T-mobile, according to Trent Alvarez, who is suing the wireless company for deceptive marketing. Alvarez says he bought a T-Mobile smartphone with a data plan advertised as unlimited. He agreed to a two year contract.

However, Alvarez, who filed the class action suit in Yolo, California, alleges that T-Mobile caps data after between 5 and 10 gigabytes before it either cuts off service or reduces data speed. He says he was not told of any caps, and that the contract advertised their service as unlimited. T-Mobile acknowledges a cap but disputes that it was not disclosed.

Alvarez says he found out about the data limit in May when he received a text message from the carrier stating: "Your data usage in this billing cycle has exceeded 10 GB; data throughput for the remainder of the cycle may be reduced to 50 kbps or less."

T-Mobile has stated that the limits impacted very few people and were only put in place to prevent extremely heavy users from slowing down other customer?s data speeds. T-mobile has further said that users are told of the limits before executing the two-year wireless service contact, consumeraffairs.com reported.

However, according to consumeraffairs.com, Alvarez argues that the only mention of any limits in the contract are extremely vague:?on the very last page of [a T-Mobile] brochure, buried in minuscule type barely readable, [it states] 'Your data session may be slowed, suspended, terminated, or restricted if you use your service in a way that interferes with or impacts our network or ability to provide quality service to other users ?'?

In the meantime, Alvarez will have to stick to locations with WiFi. He says his phone is currently all but useless once hit reaches the data cap.

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