I recently had a very bad experience in which my data service was not functioning and customer service/technical representatives were of little help. I have managed to resolve the situation (for now), but as I know others have left the service due to similar issues I thought I would share my experience in the hopes of T-Mobile learning how to actually resolve this issue.
I have only been with T-Mobile for a little over a month now. I was attracted to T-Mobile because of the inexpensive $30 100 Minute / Unlimited Text and Data plan, which worked fine for the first month. I had used a refill card to increase my balance to more than the $30 necessary for the next charge date. Last Friday was my charge date, and as expected $30 was deducted from my balance and the minutes were reset to 0 used. Calls and texts worked just as expected. However, my data usage still reported 598.1 MB, which was the exact amount reported before the charge took place, and I could no longer use my data because all traffic was redirected to an upsell page of http://u.web2go.com/upsell/upsell.do?url=<URL for page I wanted to visit>. For example, if I wanted to go to http://www.google.com, the page would be redirected to http://u.web2.go.com/upsell/upsell.do?url=http://www.google.com instead. The only sites that were exempt from this appear to have been www.t-mobile.com (not too sure about this) and my.t-mobile.com (this worked via browser and app). The page is only reachable from a T-Mobile data connection, and it simply stated that I did not have data service on my plan or I had used my bucket of data. There were two problems with this statement: 1) I did have a data plan, and 2) it was unlimited, the only caveat being the throttling that took place after 5 GB had been used. So neither condition was correct. My primary phone is an iPhone 5 (bought from Verizon since it is unlocked), but I also attempted to use my SIM card in my wife's T-Mobile-branded Motorola CLIQ. Both phones exhibited the same behavior.
I spent several hours with support personnel, starting with online chat but a majority of it over the phone. We checked the settings on the phone(s), rebooted, cleared history, and all manner of other questionable "troubleshooting" scripts, all to no avail. No one seemed to understand that I was, in fact, getting data, but only limited to the upsell page and T-Mobile services. There were all sorts of accusations by the customer support and technical representatives, such my iPhone not being supported on the network (false, as it had worked previous to this event, and the fact that I had the same results in my wife's CLIQ), my coverage being bad (in the same phone call, I was transferred back and forth several times and they kept insisting on checking my coverage, which is great), my using my phone to tether to a PC (this was a ridiculous charge after mentioning that I had checked my.t-mobile.com on my home PC using my cable service), and my SIM card not functioning correctly (this really does not make sense, I just got it a few weeks ago and a charge to my account shouldn't affect the SIM circuitry). I kept trying to point out that there was a problem with my account, which only a few of the technical representatives even dared acknowledge and none of the customer service representatives wanted to believe. The only common factor was that I didn't have actual data access and that my data balance was still messed up.
What I ultimately wanted was for an attempted reset on my balance. I still hadn't used an minutes on my account, as I had only called customer service, and my other services were unlimited (technical limitations implied), so I just needed my data reset. But not one of the representatives would try anything like this. All they wanted to do was submit these ambiguous support tickets, which would take three days time to sort out and, as web searches have revealed, don't ever solve this issue. I knew I needed a reset and not a support ticket, but no one else saw it that way. Such a shame, as that is what fixed my problem.
The exact solution went like this: I asked about switching my plan without incurring extra costs, because $30 for 100 minutes on a plan with no data is ludicrous. If I wasn't going to have data, I wanted minutes. I was offered a generous upgrade to the $50 plan (unlimited everything, but data throttled after 100 MB) at no cost, and the option to switch back to my original plan (which is normally only allowed on new activations) if I wanted before the next charge date. I accepted the offer, still very upset by the lack of actual help and the the relative technical ignorance of the technical representatives. Ten minutes after hanging up, my data usage reset to 0 MB and my data worked!
Essentially, the data was reset, just as I had requested but could not get anyone at T-Mobile to do for me. I am still debating staying with T-Mobile after this fiasco, since there was such a simple solution but no one wanted to believe me. I really hope that T-Mobile Support takes note of this situation and will educate their support teams about this simple fix for a problem that no customer could cause.