Originally Posted by
JEFFJAGUAR
So let me try to see if I have this correct since I am not familiar with the terms being used. It is t mobile that deliberately throttles the speed of the data; they pay the roaming partner the same no matter what the end receivr gets. They are throttling the data to try to entice people to pay for the higher speed data packages and could easily allow everybody to have higher speed data.
That is essentially correct. T-Mobile throttles the speed so (a) you're enticed to buy a high speed data pack; and (b) data consumption by T-Mobile subscribers on the foreign networks is less... slower data typically correlates to less overall data consumed, which translates to less T-Mobile has to pay the roaming partner for data consumed.
As others have mentioned, the type of network you're connected to in the foreign country makes a heap of difference. An overseas 3G or LTE connection throttled to 128kbps or whatever speed by T-Mobile is a heck of a lot more usable than a 2G/EDGE connection.