Customers traveling out of the range of T-Mobile’s network might be seeing some changes to the limits they can stretch their roaming data coverage. Documents reportedly leaked from T-Mobile reveal the company is planning to cut subscribers off at certain data thresholds when they’re outside the network.

TmoNews, via Consumer Reports, says they’ve got T-Mobile’s plans for the new era in domestic roaming plans. Every billing cycle, a customer’s allotment will be reset, and your roaming access limits are set proportionate to the size of your data plan. Your only hope of coverage once you reach the limit is to connect to a Wi-Fi service or get back to the network area.

It works out to a roaming limit of 5MB for those on the 200MB data plan, about 2.5% of their total, or for those with 2GB, their cap is set at 10MB — about 0.5% of their monthly plan.

The site says T-Mobile will notify customers in early February in their bills, email and via text messages. A grandfathered account isn’t safe, either — the new allotments cover existing accounts as well as new ones, with very few exceptions. Once you get to 80% of your monthly allotment, you’ll be notified via text, as well as once you’ve reached 100% usage.

T-Mobile sees this as a way to reduce data roaming costs and stay competitive — after all, everyone else is doing it!

While domestic data roaming allotments are new for T-Mobile, they are currently used across the wireless industry and are quite common with other carriers. It is expected that few customers use enough domestic data while roaming to be impacted by this change.

Various accounts and services are exempt from this new plan, including T-Mobile employees, small businesses, government accounts, mobile broadband rate plans, text and picture messaging and others.

T-Mobile Changes To Domestic Roaming Detailed, Confirmed For April 5th [TmoNews]

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