A T-Mobile Riddle

I’m an emo­tional guy. It works both for me and against me. Some­times though, the facts speak for themselves.

Here’s the riddle.

You have a mobile phone plan with 1,000 EDGE (mobile) min­utes, and unlim­ited UMA usage (UMA is a pro­pri­etary VoIP tech­nol­ogy that T-Mobile offers). You are charged $0.40 for each minute over the pre-paid 1,000 on the EDGE/Mobile network.

Over the course of 1 billing cycle, you use 900 EDGE min­utes and 900 UMA minutes…

How much over­age do you incur?

On an eth­i­cal car­rier, you would incur no overage.

On T-Mobile, it depends on what order those min­utes were used. See, even though you have unlim­ited UMA min­utes and are never charged for UMA over­ages, those min­utes count against your EDGE/Mobile total. So, once you’ve spo­ken on the phone for 1,000 min­utes in a given billing cycle, regard­less of whether you use UMA or EDGE, you start to be charged for each minute on EDGE after 1,000 min­utes talked.

Use your own judg­ment on that prac­tice. Though if any­one from T-Mobile reads this and wants to jus­tify this prac­tice, com­ments are mod­er­ated, but I promise I will let authen­tic T-Mobile com­ments through regard­less of their position.