I don't know about other territories, but in the UK this has been tested in court for ADSL providers.
The claim there is that you have unlimited access where access is defined by time (unlimited being 24/7/365.25) rather than unlimited bandwidth to use in that unlimited time. To back this up as a valid argument, it was pointed out that back when dial-up was king most providers (even those with only expensive per-minute access plans) had limits on how long you could be connected in one session and in total in a given day (this was to reduce the number of incoming lines and modem devices they needed to provide the service). So in this sense "unlimited" would be better termed "always available" or "always on".
Of course this isn't how they advertise the service, the adverts very distinctly imply (but are very careful never to actually state) that unlimited means bandwidth as they talk on end about downloading and streaming and show the happy people in ad-land watching HD content with reckless abandon.
A grey area still not tested to my knowledge is providers who have changed what the work unlimited means where it previously did explicitly mean unlimited bandwidth (when they were naive enough to think people would not find a use for enough to cause a problem).
One legal recourse t-mobile users may have in this case is if their plan previously explicitly stated a cap or fair-use policy higher than the 500MB. If you plan has gone from 3GB to 0.5MB then you probably have a case for demanding you keep the 3Gb until the end of the contracted period or to have your contract terminated early at no cost to you. Of course your original agreement may have weasel words like "unlimited with fair use policy, _currently_ set as 3GB/month", which would give them a get-out clause.
Comments
I don't know about other territories, but in the UK this has been tested in court for ADSL providers.
The claim there is that you have unlimited access where access is defined by time (unlimited being 24/7/365.25) rather than unlimited bandwidth to use in that unlimited time. To back this up as a valid argument, it was pointed out that back when dial-up was king most providers (even those with only expensive per-minute access plans) had limits on how long you could be connected in one session and in total in a given day (this was to reduce the number of incoming lines and modem devices they needed to provide the service). So in this sense "unlimited" would be better termed "always available" or "always on".
Of course this isn't how they advertise the service, the adverts very distinctly imply (but are very careful never to actually state) that unlimited means bandwidth as they talk on end about downloading and streaming and show the happy people in ad-land watching HD content with reckless abandon.
A grey area still not tested to my knowledge is providers who have changed what the work unlimited means where it previously did explicitly mean unlimited bandwidth (when they were naive enough to think people would not find a use for enough to cause a problem).
One legal recourse t-mobile users may have in this case is if their plan previously explicitly stated a cap or fair-use policy higher than the 500MB. If you plan has gone from 3GB to 0.5MB then you probably have a case for demanding you keep the 3Gb until the end of the contracted period or to have your contract terminated early at no cost to you. Of course your original agreement may have weasel words like "unlimited with fair use policy, _currently_ set as 3GB/month", which would give them a get-out clause.