Kim Kardashian likes the camera. She likes acting, she likes posing, she likes selfies and she’s found time away from promoting her game to star in a new Superbowl commercial for T-Mobile, the Un-Carrier. She spends the commercial talking about outfits and back ends, which sent me into a flurry wondering what Internet of Things improvements T-Mobile USA had released with their back end software that I had somehow missed in the news, but it turns out she meant something completely different.
In the commercial, Kim is talking about T-Mobile USA’s new data stash, how customers can save their data for a year without it being reclaimed back by the wireless carrier. This is the new T-Mobile data rollover plan and it makes sense for us to keep what we’ve paid for. After all, if we have paid our wireless carrier hard earned money for our regular allowance of data, but we don’t use it, should they really take it back? I am in two minds about this… my smartphone has an 8 GB monthly allowance and I rarely exceed 1 GB of this. My tablet has a 10 GB allowance and here I might use more than 4 GB, if I deliberately watch Netflix on the bus. I am still massively inside both of my allowances and every month I lose the extra data… but I’ve been losing this data since I refreshed my plans last summer and I have not changed my habits or routine enough such that I miss out on my lost data. If my carriers let me keep it… I would have a data stash building up by somewhere over 10 GB a month between both devices… and I likely would never use it. From the carrier perspective, if I were to try to use it (say, burn through 50 GB of data in a weekend) this could put something of a strain on the service in my particular location; they have the right to throttle my data speeds if I’m causing a “local disturbance” (I love that expression!). I might find that I am unable to use all of my data in one go! Instead, I’ve opted for the plans that I am on because this ensures that I don’t even come close to my limits, so do not approach running into overuse charges.
Nevertheless, it’s good to see that the Super Bowl commercials are already being leaked across the Internet a few days before Sunday. In the UK, whilst I may stay up all night to watch the game we don’t see the commercials apart from these leaks, so I especially appreciate them. However, what I won’t be doing is using my spare data allowance to check out Kim’s stash of back end outfits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTwzsV3I3OQ