For T-Mobile to be #1 in customer service, it tells me that the telecommunications industry is in pretty bad shape. I seem to keep having this ongoing fight with T-Mobile at the beginning of each month. My "unlimited use" plaan keeps getting cut off after 10 Gb of data transfer. When I call up, they say "Well, it's unlimited from the handset but not unlimited as a tethered modem". However, that's not what the website says.

The other drama is they don't like my phone. Apparently there are a couple different flavors of 3G data service. T-Mobile uses UMTS (~384 Kbps) but my Sony phone is a HSPDA device (~720 Kbps). Last night around 9:00 PM, T-Mobile pushed an update into my phone that caused the tethering feature to be permenantly disabled. Nice.

So... they're making me buy a new phone.

Yeah.

Granted, it's only $40. But in principle, I find it outrageous that they purposefully crippled my phone because it's too fast for their network. Why can't they just restrict the phone to the 384 Kbps channel instead of ruining a perfectly good phone? Of course, no one in customer care had an answer for that question.

I'm really not happy about this.