T-Mobile Hotspot Usage Bug with Tidal Streaming
I have been having issues with Tidal streaming on my Samsung S24 since February '24. I have determined that the data that Tidal is using to stream music is being recognized as "hotspot data" by T-Mobile. Each carrier billing cycle the T-Mobile system sends me a message stating I have hit my hotspot data cap. At that time Tidal becomes extremely slow and encounters buffering issues. All of my other applications work perfectly fine, I have unlimited data with my T-Mobile plan (Magenta Max55+), but for some reason, Tidal is using hotspot data or its data usage is being miscategorized as hotspot data. On my phone hotspot data usage reported is 0GB month over month. I never use my hotspot. Something weird is going on here, I am not sure if it is on the Tidal side in how it requests data or on the T-Mobile. I need help in having this issue investigated and escalated to the appropriate parties (Either at Tidal, T-Mobile, or maybe even Samsung). I have attempted to inform T-Mobile but they their phone support seems ill-equipped to handle uncommon technical problems. I am not sure if this will ever be resolved. I suppose in T-mobiles eyes this would be like a "P4" priority. Unless there is some security risk involved I doubt they will care. Here are links showing other customers have experienced similar problems: https://community.t-mobile.com/accounts-services-4/t-mobile-shows-hotspot-data-usage-when-it-is-disabled-in-my-phone-settings-47603https://community.t-mobile.com/plans-features-and-billing-46/why-is-tidal-data-being-recognize-as-hotspot-data-50869?postid=223600#post223600Hotspot Usage when Not using Hotspot | Tidal running slow
I wanted to share my experience in case others are facing a similar issue: I received a new Samsung S24 in February. Since then, I've been receiving notifications about exceeding my hotspot data usage, even though the hotspot is turned off. This seemed strange. I reported this to T-Mobile support, but they kept pointing to their system showing I was using hotspot data and advised me to turn it off. Additionally, I use Tidal for music streaming. Recently, I've been unable to stream music using mobile data as it was extremely slow or wouldn't load at all. Today, after receiving another hotspot usage message (indicating I exceeded the 5GB cap without using the hotspot), I noticed my Tidal streaming stopped working on mobile data this billing cycle. I checked my phone's data usage, and it showed Tidal had used over 5GB of mobile data-the exact amount as the hotspot data cap. It seems T-Mobile's system was misreporting Tidal's mobile data usage as hotspot data. I tried explaining this to support, but they didn't acknowledge it. They reset the network connection to my phone, which seemed to resolve the issue. I suspect this problem might be related to T-Mobile's "Music Freedom" feature included in my plan, which is supposed to prioritize or differently handle music streaming traffic.
Music Freedom on Magenta 55+
I just switched my account from a Prepaid plan which is no longer offered. On that prepaid account I had the ability to stream unlimited music at no additional charges. I have scoured this web site looking to see if my new postpaid plan, Magenta 55+, has this feature. I am supposed to have 100GB of high-speed data but it gets throttled back if I use greater than 50GB. Does having unlimited data replace having Music Freedom?
