T-Mobile Shutting Down the "T-Zones Loophole"?

By Dieter Bohn
Posted on March 1, 2007 11:55 AM
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Tags: t-mobile T-Zones
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jkOnTheRun notes that lots of people are experiencing data connection problems with T-Mobile and theorizes that the possible reason is that T-Mobile has finally gotten wise to the "T-Zones Loophole", which allows you to get access to the full internet while only paying for the supposedly WAP-ony T-Zones service. A photo of an internal T-Mobile document backs this up.

It's intermittent (I haven't experienced it yet) and not limited to T-Zones users. Have you had any hassles lately with data plans?

Some folks are offering the theory that T-Mobile finally caught on to users who have been using the web services by exploiting a hole in T-Mobile’s setup and that the carrier has blocked all the various ports to shut that down. That is backed up by this internal T-Mobile Customer Service screen (posted on Howard Forums) to help reps deal with calls about this issue:

Read: jkOnTheRun: T-Mobile data plans suddenly stop working

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Comments (3)

I was hit by the data outage. My phone stopped receiving all data last Friday. Yesterday, the data connection started working again. I don't know if it's being shut down or not, I'm just happy it's working for now.

http://www.kirkwalsh.com

Posted by Kirk Walsh (Imported Comment) | March 1, 2007 1:23 PM

Yes, I also experienced 2 days of no-service here in Illioins. I don't use "loophole", however my treo having a prepaid t-mobile sim card has done whatever internet related thing I threw at it: Web (non-wap view), pop3 gmail, google maps and streaming radio. I'm very happy with t-mobile. BTW, the best data rate I got from their EDGE service was 1round 130kbps, but it's usually around 70~80kbps, which is good enough for me, The only problem is that upload speed is not fast enough, sending photos I took as an attachment to emails proved to be a bit problematic.

Posted by Rezaf_2000 (Imported Comment) | March 2, 2007 3:24 AM

This happened to me last week. I called T-Mobile and told them that I could no longer access the internet. I have the $5 plan, and was told that their servers have started checking out what people's phones were doing, and that if you were getting internet on the $5 plan, especially with the Dash that they were turning it off. The rep said that I would have to pay the $29.99 for internet access since the $5 "should" not work on the Dash. I told them that I was never told that when I bought the Dash and was not going to pay $30 bucks a month for EDGE. I told the rep I would cancel my account, she said that she could try adding the $5 internet back to my plan, but she wasn't sure if it would work. It did, and I'm back to having internet on my Dash at $5 a month. If they do this to you call and complain.

Posted by jimmie geddes (Imported Comment) | March 5, 2007 4:01 PM