What Happens When You Get 'Throttled'?

Lesson one: It's pretty easy to use up all of your wireless data service for a given month. Lesson two: When you do that, the phone company says that it'll knock your speed down into 2G territory--and it's not kidding.

Here's what the T-Mobile terms of service say: “To provide a good experience for the majority of our customers and minimize capacity issues and degradation in network performance, we may take measures including temporarily reducing data throughput for a subset of customers who use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth.”

It continues: “In addition, if your total usage exceeds 5GB (amount is subject to change without notice; please check T-Mobile's T&Cs on www.T-Mobile.com for updates) during a billing cycle, we may reduce your data speed for the remainder of that billing cycle.”