This is definitely interesting. Last night, as part of their Uncarrier 6 initiative, T-Mobile announced Music Freedom. Basically allowing you to listen and stream music without any restrictions, or it counting against your data cap. Today, T-Mobile has sent word out that they are doing the same for the OOKLA Speedtest app. Now you can speedtest your network all you want and not have to worry about being throttled or going over your cap, at least on T-Mobile. I know for me, OOKLA’s Speedtest is about half of my data consumption each month, since most of my data is on WiFi anyways. So this is a pretty good deal. I know last night there were some issues with net neutrality with T-Mobile’s Music Freedom, but this is a bit different. As T-Mobile isn’t being paid by these companies for this data to not count against your plan, but they are doing it all on their own. Something, no other carrier would do.
According to TmoNews’ source:
“On June 19, the OOKLA Speedtest app was removed from network throttling. Customers experiencing slow data speeds due to throttling now see our true network speeds (that they are missing due to being throttled) when they check their data speed connection using the OOKLA Speedtest app.”
It’s likely that we’ll see a press release from T-Mobile soon about this change, or maybe it’s just one of those quiet things that they do. Either way, it’s a pretty big deal. I know I’m always speedtesting on my phone, and that uses up a big chunk of my data cap, well not anymore. This should be in effect starting today. So get those T-Mobile phones out and start speed testing and let us know what speeds you get. Also if you’ve already hit your cap, let us know what speeds you’re getting already, in the comments down below.