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T-Mobile Brings Back Unlimited Data For All (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: T-Mobile is eliminating data plans for new customers -- and for current ones who opt in. The company is getting rid of all its wireless data plans and instead offering new customers one unlimited plan, T-Mobile said Thursday. Under the new plan, everyone will get unlimited talk, text and high-speed 4G LTE data. The company has also changed prices for unlimited. The first line will be $70 a month, the second line will cost $50 a month and additional lines will be $20 a month for up to eight lines with auto-pay turned on. The price is $5 more a month without auto-pay. For a family of four, the new plans will cost $40 a month per person. While this plan will benefit those looking for unlimited, it will cost more for people who have been subscribed to the lowest data plans. The current plan starts at $50 for 2GB of data per month. This means individual customers on its new plans will pay $20 more a month. But the new price is lower than the cost of unlimited right now. Today, T-Mobile customers who want unlimited pay $95 a month for an individual line.
Compare T-Mobile plans including the new ones at Wirefly to see the difference.
Compare T-Mobile plans including the new ones at Wirefly to see the difference.
Last time we had unlimited data plans, there were people who would tether hundreds of gigabytes a month (maybe using their cellular connection as a primary internet connection with wifi tethering). I hope "unlimited" this time does not have an asterisk.
I liberally use however much data/text/minutes I want on Ting (same networks as T-Mobile) and my bill is never more than $30.
Honestly these unlimited plans seem like massive overkill; especially for T-Mobile because they already give you the data for YouTube and several music streaming services for free. What are people doing on their phones and tablets that's using several GB per month?
Do you really get to use unlimited data? Or do you get to use 5GB of data and then they start throttling you?
I'm currently on T-Mobile's pay as you go. $30 a month for 100 minutes talk, unlimited text, 5GB unthrotled data + unlimited throtled data. The only thing that _might_ tempt me to switch for more than double the price is if the data is _really_ unlimited and entirely unthrotled.
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I switched to T-Mobile when I got my latest phone. I had an original, grandfathered AT&T unlimited data plan since the first iPhone came out, and switching saved me about $30/month already. So now it's going to drop again? Cool.
I'm also seeing LTE speeds from 70-80Mbps on the average, and the highest I ever saw on AT&T was 20 or so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Unlimited everything just $50 a month for the first line, additional lines are less. Had it for years, still has it.
Sprint and Verizon fall back onto CDMA, which means phones for these networks will be useless outside the US unless on an LTE network.
That is largely why I switched from Virgin Mobile (which uses Sprint) to T-Mobile. Already I had to work a week in Canada - and didn't have to do anything, T-Mobile's partners took over when I was in Canada and I didn't have to pay a dime. My son visited Germany for a few weeks and, while there was some per minute costs, he didn't have to trade out any chips or do anything special - it just worked. It also costs the same for four people (since the rates go down for each additional person) and we get more data (6GB vs 2GB I had with V-Mobile). Of course, plans and data limits seem to change daily, so YMMV.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It was years ago when I signed up for T-mobile. They described my plan and said it included, among other things, international calling. I told them specifically "I don't need, nor will I ever use international calling. Remove that and I will sign up for your service." They said "no problem!" and I got their phone service.
Fast forward 4 years and my phone was stolen. I was having a great time that weekend at the downtown high-rise apartment of an amazingly generous and affluent acquaintance with quite a few other friends and acquaintances. Being preoccupied I did not notice the phone was missing for 2 days. Once I returned home and realized it was well and truly gone I contacted T-mobile. The conversation went like this.
Me: "Hi my phone was stolen."
T-mobile: "I see. Looks like you ran up over $900 in calls to Guatemala and Honduras over the weekend."
Me: "How can that be? I told you when I signed up for service that I would only sign up if you disabled international calling."
T-mobile: "Hmmm. Let me check. Oh, I see it here in the notes. Let me get you with a supervisor that can help you with that."
T-mobile supervisor: "Hello, since you have been a good customer we are graciously offering to discount your international calls you made by $50 if you pay in full over the phone right now."
Me: "Your associate just confirmed that I requested international calling turned off on my phone as a condition of purchasing your service, how are there international calls made on my phone and how am I responsible for that?"
T-mobile supervisor: "Your records do not show that. I can accept your credit card."
me: "...."
On subsequent calls with them they called my wife a liar. They called me a liar. They accused me of giving the phone to someone else to use, charging that person cash, and then attempting to refute the charges. They were rude, intentionally offensive, and intentionally provocative. In retrospect, I realize they did everything they could to keep me off balance and upset.
I was young and stupid and didn't contact a lawyer, go to small claims court, etc. I just didn't pay them anything, ever and considered strongly the use of fire to extract recompense for my time and frustration. Were this to happen to me today I would have someone's ass, it would be posted on the Consumerist instantly, there would be recorded conversations of them doing this, and they would be looking at a lawsuit.
TL;DR: My recommendation, no matter what they offer you, don't ever enter into a contract with T-mobile and never use them for anything more than a place to store rancid feces.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
https://fi.google.com/about/plan/
Yeah but it's Sprint.
Even if you do have good coverage, I would never suggest a CDMA carrier over a GSM carrier. You can easily get any phone from anywhere and it will work with GSM carriers.
No, because Metro PCS doesn't include roaming in partner networks or in Canada and Mexico, like T-Mo does. The savings come from the vastly reduced coverage.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
It would then, perhaps, not surprise you that the new setup is not for people like you.
Last time we had unlimited data plans, there were people who would tether hundreds of gigabytes a month ...
If, when the network became congested, the available bandwidth were fairly divided among the competing users, such usage would not be an issue. Everyone asking for less than their share would get all their data through at line rate, everyone asking for more would evenly divide the remainder. At times when the pipes were too clogged to handle it all, the "data hogs" would get the same data rate as everyone else trying to use the "Information Superhighway". They wouldn't degrade the other users' experience any more than any other user's traffic did. (It's just like the way a driver who likes to cruise flat-out at night doesn't end up going any faster than the rest of the traffic at rush hour.)
I used to wonder why it wasn't done that way. Then I get a job designing router chips, including the special-purpose coprocessors to handle bandwidth division.
It turns out that actually making fair division happen in real time requires enormous amounts of sideways communication between the states of the (otherwise independent) throttling mechanisms for each user, flow, etc. It's much easier to preset the limits and only adjust them occasionally. But that means the "data hogs" either get throttled or, when rush hour comes and they're still trying to pump lots of data, they clog the pipes. So the ISPs identify customers who use a lot of data in off hours and turn down their limits, to keep them from degrading things for everybody else. It's not good. It's not fair to those who are just trying to use the service that was advertised, or those who carefully do their data-hogging on off hours only. But it's about the best ISPs can do with the available tools.
I was starting to look into practical ways to "do it right". But the network equipment company downsized me before I'd gotten rolling on it. Now I'm fully employed doing other stuff. So somebody else will have to figure this out, and get it designed and deployed in a future equipment generation, or we'll keep having this problem.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way