Outspoken T-Mobile chief exec John Legere has taken to social media again, this time taking tethering thieves to task.
In a blog on his company’s corporate site, he said a small percentage of customers are taking advantage of the carrier’s generous 7GB LTE tethering allotment by using roots, code, apps and other workarounds to mask their usage and steal upwards of 2TB of data a 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!” he wrote yesterday.
Legere promised to take action today beginning with 3,000 abusers in order to end the practice and preserve high-speed hot-spot tethering for law-abiding customers of its unlimited 4G LTE smartphone plan.
The company said it will begin by issuing a warning, and then moving offending customers to a limited data plan with LTE speeds capped at 1GB.
“I’m not in this business to play data cop, but we started this wireless revolution to change the industry for good and to fight for consumers,” he said. “I won’t let a few thieves ruin things for anyone else. We’re going to lead from the front on this, just like we always do. Count on it!”
