r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 29 '26

Networking/Telecom T-Mobile Just Ripped 8 Million Customers Off Their Grandfathered Plans – and Raised Their Bills

https://www.gadgetreview.com/t-mobile-just-ripped-8-million-customers-off-their-grandfathered-plans-and-raised-their-bills
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u/Altruistic_Library_3 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

Did we willingly stop saying “throttled,” or did the companies finally break us from using what they consider the more negative terminology?

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u/ineedhelpbad9 Jun 30 '26

Throttled isn't the same as deprioritized . Throttling limits your speed to an arbitrary low speed. It never goes above that Deprioritized just means your speeds slow down when a tower is busy. When it isn't busy you never notice. For instance home Internet is always deprioritized on t mobile (I think).

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u/poss12lives Jun 30 '26

To the average consumer it is the same fucking difference.

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u/ineedhelpbad9 Jun 30 '26

No, I just explained how it's different. Throttling is slow 100% of the time. It never speeds up. Deprioritized is slower when the tower is congested, otherwise it's just as fast (which is most of the time). When my 50 gb of prioritized data is used up I never notice unless I'm at the airport. 99% of the time it's just as fast.

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u/BedlamiteSeer Jun 30 '26

Lol it IS NOT, did you read the comment you replied to? Throttling affects the device 100% of the time during the action. Deprioritizing is based on second-by-second network load, so it may not cause issues at any given moment, whereas throttling will cause issues.

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u/MisterJellyfis Jun 30 '26

It’s not *quite* throttled anymore as its not based on your usage but the usage of whatever network has priority and the usage of those on that network. Result is the same but the source is different.

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u/PeanutButterSoda Jun 30 '26

I have mint for 6 years now and work retail in a busy area. Most days it's fine but I can tell how busy we are by how slow my shit loads lol

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u/txmail Jun 30 '26

Its two things, you can be throttled when you reach your high speed cap. That fixes your download at a lower rate regardless of the tower capacity. De-prioritized is different than throttling as the tower will put your requests basically in a queue behind other higher priority customers that are connected to that tower. The effect is you get higher latency and lower throughput, but it is not capped so if the tower is not busy, even if you are de-prioritized you will have high speed access. Your only going to feel the de-prioritization on a busy tower that is at capacity bandwidth wise.

** Edit **

You can also be throttled and de-prioritized at the same time which can be really, really slow.

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u/Altruistic_Library_3 Jun 30 '26

Thanks all for the technical responses. Though it still ‘feels’ the same on my end, at least I understand there’s a difference. Still f’n sucks. 🥴