T-Mobile's throttling does a great job of highlighting how bloated a lot of modern websites have gotten.

The last time I tried using it overseas, text-heavy sites like HN loaded almost as fast as normal. Reddit was mostly usable, but certain subreddits were painfully slow due to image-heavy custom styles. But try to load an article from a typical news website, and the connection would time out before it managed to render anything.

It's not a horrible solution though. I'm kind of cheap, I don't want to pay for unlimited data. So I have an inexpensive plan with T-Mobile that gets throttled. But I can still have some internet access for free once I go over my limit.

Yes, can confirm. I can't actually load a webpage on their '2G' service anytime I travel to europe.

I suspect that their partners in europe throttle with an algorithm so aggressive it flat-out breaks TCP.

> I can't actually load a webpage on their '2G' service anytime I travel to europe

Remember when web pages were measured in kilobytes? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

That's accurate. You can however pay for international 3G via their "One Plus" upgrade package if you wish, which makes it at least usable.

It’s not true 3G. It shows up in your tab bar as 3G, but it is throttled to 2x what the 2G is, something like .25 Mbps. It makes it marginally useful, but nowhere close to Fi. I’m saying this as someone who runs Fi on an iPhone, using it in a half broken hacky way is still superior to TMo