T-Mobile US CEO John Legere is furious.
This is nothing unusual, except that this time he is furious with his own customers, rather than with rival operators.
The outspoken chief executive took to T-Mobile’s official blog over the weekend to decry the efforts by a small proportion of subscribers to circumvent the company’s teth ering restrictions.
"We are going after a small group of users who are stealing data so blatantly and extremely that it is ridiculous," said Legere on Sunday.
"If their activities are left unchecked their actions could eventually have a negative effect on the experience of honest T-Mobile customers," he said.
Customers who sign up to T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan receive a limited amount of tethering data. Once they have used their allocation, their connection speed is subject to throttling.
However, some users have found ways to side-step the restriction.
"They’re downloading apps that hide their tether usage, rooting their phones, writing code to mask their activity, etc. They are ‘hacking’ the system to swipe high-speed tethered data," Legere explained.
"These aren’t naive amateurs; they are clever hackers who are wilfully stealing for their own selfish gain," he continued, adding that some are using as much as 2 TB of data per month.
"I’m not sure what they are doing with it – stealing wireless access for their entire business, powering a small cloud service, providing broadband to a small city, mining for bitcoin – but I really don’t care," Legere said.
T-Mobile is contacting these customers this week.
"We are going after every thief, and I am starting with the 3,000 users who know exactly what they are doing," Legere said.
"We started this wireless revolution to change the industry for good and to fight for consumers. I won’t let a few thieves ruin things for anyone else," he added.
