T-Mobile adds 1.3M customers in Q2, continues to grab wireless share | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile adds 1.3M customers in Q2, continues to grab wireless share

zdnet.com

49 pointsartsandsci69 comments

When I run out of my 8gb of data on my t mobile plan, there is no way to buy more data if I need it.

I tried on online with no success, and even went into the store to ask - they said I could not buy more LTE data if I had used my 8gb for the month.

T mobile used to let me buy data by the GB for my phone when it ran out. It was $10/GB.

Now when I try to select that option on their website the website crashes when trying to process the request.

What kind of cell phone company in 2017 doesn't let customers purchase more LTE data when their monthly data allotment runs out? A shitty one.

I like t mobile and the service is good most places I go, but fuck them for not letting me buy data by the GB when I run out. I will be switching mobile providers once my lazy ass finds the time to do the paperwork.

They have a new unlimited data plan which has replaced all of their other plans. This model is now being adopted by the other carriers.

I just went and investigated their site to find this new plan.

I tried to select it and got this message:

>>We’re seeing a huge interest in our recent offers, which is impacting site performance. Please try again later, or call Care on 611 from your T-Mobile phone. Thank you!!

What a bunch of bullshit.

edit: Please reply and explain your downvotes. Do you think a huge company like t mobile should have a shitty website that can't handle some load once and a while?

Its indeed bad craftsmanship- if i cant service a customer, i at least should allow him to enlist his interest, by leaving behind his email. That way, once i have the performance, i can callback.

You have to call them. Its a pain but support did this for me a month ago.

Why should I have to call them? This is a giant company that has plenty of programmers on staff. Their site hasn't changed much in years. What have all their programmers been working on?

I feel your pain. The website keeps crashing whenever I try to buy a data pass. However, I was able to get one yesterday by opening the T-Mobile app, signing in, and pressing the chat button in the top right. That let me text a T-Mobile rep instantly who let me buy a pass. Took less than 5 minutes.

If T-mobile has a weakness, it is not signal strength. Coverage maps are a red herring. If you look at AT&T coverage in SoCal, you would think that they have it on lock. However in Downtown LA, AT&T is atrocious, and T-Mobile is stellar. Even if signal is weak where you live, T-Mobile was the first to unlock WiFi Calling for its phones. They even give you an awesome router for your home. If somebody is telling you that T-Mobile coverage sucks, its because they have no other complaints than this subjective opinion. Remember, coverage = Your Mileage May Vary

this is only true in cities, which I guess covers the majority of people, but as someone who camps across the country, and often drives there, T-mobile is terrible outside most metro areas, and I rely on my girlfriend's verizon to keep us from getting lost and to link up with other campers.

And I'm not just talking about the deep boonies either. Even in state parks that are less than an hour from densely populated cities, I often have no bars.

Most state/national parks have atrocious service because tower companies can't get towers installed there. That's not a carrier's fault.

The issue is Verizon and AT&T have coverage in these places. They’re just not a good choice if you are frequently out of the city. Very cheap though, it’s a good fit for a lot of people. (I recently switched from Verizon to T-Mobile on my iPad and have an AT&T phone.)

Have any specific places coverage is lacking? I can get that to the right capacity planning dept at TMO.

A few days ago I was driving back from Rainier in Washington State and had full bars LTE on AT&T and no service at all on T-Mobile. It was on 410 right outside of Enumclaw, WA. Had to be almost in town to get any signal from T-Mobile.

AT&T and Verizon actually have some coverage inside the park around the Sunrise area (I believe coming from the Crystal Mountain ski area) while T-Mobile has none.

To be fair, the T-Mobile coverage map is extremely spotty in WA so it's not like they're claiming they have a great network here, but it is very noticeably worse than the two largest networks. From their map it looks like they're weak in the whole Northwest. Sort of curious considering they are based here, but I get that the topography is difficult.

In the Midpeninsula Open Space lands (e.g. San Mateo county), I routinely lose data (even 3G and 2G) and often voice on T-Mobile while other carriers are fine.

In one of these (Russian Ridge?), there is a pair of towers with maybe 30 transmitters and dishes. Even there, nothing on T-Mobile.

Even my neighborhood tower was crap for about 2 months. Only after the fact did they acknowledge the problem.

The entirety of I-10 from the outskirts of Phoenix to Palm Springs is a T-Mobile black hole for even the most minimal data usage.

Entire stretch from North of Rockford to baraboo Wisconsin. Most of central Illinois, from Louisville to Stanton ky

By no means would I call T-Mobile's rural coverage great, but how recent is the phone you're using with them? Specifically, does it have Band 12 support? If not, you're missing out on most of their coverage improvements.

How can we tell which radios are included in our devices? I have 5 different handsets.

T-Mobile picked up some lower frequency (greater range, penetration) licenses around the end of last year. I'm waiting for their deployment/integration into their service, to see what difference they make. I've grown increasingly tired of Verizon Wireless's recent behavior, but they have had coverage in areas I visit where T-Mobile has not.

Something to consider is that only newer phone models support all the new spectrum that Tmo has utilized to expand coverage. YMMV but some of the lower band stuff is essential for coverage in rural areas.

What bands? I have a 6p and it's still pretty bad

For a family plan with 3 people, we pay $270/mo for unlimited everything, yearly phone upgrades, insurance (damage/loss/theft) and 7gb tethering per line.

And sometimes we get free pizzas or movie tickets on T-Mobile Tuesdays.

And their customer service has been wonderful so far!

That seem high with TMobile. They have (or had) a plan for $150, 4 lines, unlimited everything.

Yearly phone upgrades, so I'm assuming he's they are paying $40/mo per phone, insurance is another $10/mo per phone too I think.

Yeah, the breakdown is something close to that.

I assume that the "$270/mo" may include any phone financing costs. To your point the $120 per month/4 lines is $30, which could very well be the additional financing costs for 4 iPhones. I'd be curious to see if the total monthly charges drop even further on the plan without taxes and fees.

edit: rdudek below also makes a good point about the insurance costs.

T-Mobile Tuesdays is a great case study for a customer loyalty app.

1) Unobtrusive and separate from all the other junkware (ie. not bundled into the main app), 2) conditioning to check it regularly, 3) giveaways that are (sometimes) things people actually want and that create conversation with other people (free pizza!).

I think Verizon had some kind of points system that seemed confusing and useless, I certainly was never able to redeem it for anything good and just ignored it.

Service-wise T-Mobile works well for me in cities, but the reception is noticeably flakier than my old Verizon phone. Outside the cities it's much spottier (girlfriend's AT&T phone will have full signal, T-mobile no service). However, I like supporting a player who isn't one of the big 2 oligopolists. US telecoms is awful & overpriced and any competition is good competition.

I love having T-Mobile. I know their music unlimited streaming stuff breaks net neutrality, but god damn is it super useful to listen to music without having it eat into my data.

But yeah, sometimes I contemplate swapping back to AT&T or Verizon simply because if I'm not in a big city, T-Mobile becomes super unreliable. This has improved with time over the last 6 years that I've been with them (I mean they used to be flaky even IN LA, and that has really changed), but I get reminded often when I go on road trips or hikes.

> Unobtrusive and separate from all the other junkware

In the early days it wasn't. They'd text multiple times announcing and reminding about it. Took a lot of complaining for them to stop messaging me.

Verizon's point "rewards" system is the worst loyalty program that I have ever seen. I have close to 200k points and they are essentially useless, unless there happens to be a good daily deal available. But the good daily deals sell out in <10 minutes generally. It really shouldn't be called a rewards system at all.

I think the Tuesdays app is obnoxious.

It starts with a fake game at loud volume even if the handset is silenced! You can't shut that off. Redemption attempts routinely crash. Some awards are same-day only. Some require privacy sucks, like location services turned on.

Move to the newer plans. I pay $125 for 5 lines (2 are free) after Kickback rebates. One of the free lines was from a limited time promo.

I switched to T-Mobile but I had to switch back because of reception issues. Their service is horrible if you live in a big apartment complex.

I hope they improve. Their unlimited data plan overseas is probably the biggest perk in the industry.

they'll give you a 4g lte cellspot for free, yes, it will use your internet connection (which might matter if it's metered), but you'll get perfect connectivity.

They'll provide signal-boosting hardware for free as well.

I switched from At&t to t-mobile few months ago. I used to pay $130 for two lines, now I pay $80 for 3 lines. The reception is not great, but with all the perks like movie tickets, rentals the $80 monthly almost pays for itself.

AT&T's service quality is better than T-mobile, but hey T-mobile is almost free.

Out of curiosity, which T-Mobile plan did you get? I thought their current big "we only have one plan" thing worked out to around $140/month for three lines.

T-mobile one - they had a promotion for 3 lines for $100 with free iPhone transfer in. Paid off my phones with the gift cards they sent.

I don't burn more than 2gb of data per device as I am mostly on wifi, so I get $10 as kickback. So, it works out to $80/month.

t-mobile hookup ;)

heck, I was a t-mobile customer that transferred all my lines out to google voice just to be able to get this :)

I used to be with T-Mobile, their service in SF Bay Area was horrible, no signal indoors, had to try 2-3 times to make a call, call quality was bad.

I thought, what's the point in paying a bit less money if I get something that's unusable, so I switched to Verizon.

It got a lot better once they got more spectrum, especially indoors. Depending on when you quit it may be significantly better. They also have wifi calling which also helps indoors.

Specifically, T-Mobile has deployed their 700MHz blocks throughout the country, which gives them much better indoor and rural coverage. You need to make sure your handset supports LTE band 12 to take advantage of it. They also have a significant amount of recently-purchased 600MHz spectrum (LTE band 71) which they are in the process of lighting up.

I'm normally happy with T-Mobile in the cities, but after a cross-country road trip I'm pretty disappointed with their service in the Great Plains and PNW. My traveling companion consistently had service with LTE with AT&T while I was on edge or 3G. On the East Coast and Midwest my T-Mobile service is stellar. I probably won't switch anything because 99% of my time I'm in the Chicago city limits, but it was a bit disappointing to have to drive without streaming services or podcasts.

I use podcast addict to pile up my podcasts. I have maybe 100 hours sitting ready to listen to locally.

I hit the tmobile glitch up in Wisconsin.. but as long as I plan ahead it is ok. I have the areas downloaded locally to google maps etc.

Not perfect, but not terrible either.

Yeah, I never have been big on podcasts but ever since they added it to Spotify I've actually discovered a bunch of great stuff. Makes those long drives when you can't agree on music easier.

Yeah, as an avid camper, backpacker, climber, or general outdoor person knows, you need at least one person with Verizon in your party. Tmobile is not great at all outside of cities.

I drove from Indiana to Seattle two years ago while on Tmobile. I really only had issues in the mountains, in National Parks (yellowstone really, the badlands were fine for the most part, and had full LTE at Mt. Rushmore), and chunks of South Dakota.

Out of curiosity, does your phone support Band 12? Because they have been really pushing that rollout which roughly triples their range and building penetration, so I wonder if that could account for our different experiences.

Not sure, it's an iPhone 6s. Sure a lot of the places were a little bit out there (Eastern Washington, Badlands, Southern Utah, Yellowstone) but my friend was nearly at full service the entire time (aside from mountains). We ended up just installing Spotify on her iPad and logging in with my account :)

funny thing is that they don't even try hard.

they keep changing plans. their market just shout their brand and some price they dont even offer anymore. and they always try to move me to a cheaper plan even though I want to stay on the much more expensive one just because I dont want to think about roaming when I travel.

Yup. It speaks to just how terrible Verizon and AT&T are that T-Mobile has all these fuckups and they're still far-and-away the best choice.

T-Mobile has worst service quality and hence why it's cheaper.

I have no idea why this is even an argument. T-mobiles coverage outside of metropolitan areas is worse than Verizon and AT&T. I'm a big fan on T-mobile but I rarely travel outside of metro areas except by plane. If I did have to drive a lot in rural areas, I would definitely be on Verizon.

Call roaming or data/text roaming? I'm on their latest plan ($75) and data/text works for "free" in a ton of countries. I've used it in Peru, Mexico, and Iceland so far.

The "free roaming" is EDGE (aka "2G") [1], which is too slow for most things these days, to the point of being unusable. You could check your email in a pinch, but that's about it. Forget about, say, Google Maps.

I'm in Germany at the moment, and I'm using a European SIM card instead of my T-Mobile in order to get stuff done. Germany's 4G/LTE is notoriously spotty, but at least I can get 4G most of the time.

You can buy T-Mobile "data pass", but it's ridiculously expensive; the largest pass you can buy is a 500MB, for $50 (!).

The competition is equally bad, of course. AT&T charges $10 per day (!) for international roaming, meaning you're given the same amount of data as in the US.

[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/travel-abroad-with-simple-global

I've been using the free unlimited roaming from T-Mobile on several trips to Japan, Argentina, France, and Italy. Often, the speeds are actually faster than EDGE, unless the network is busy. I have had no issues using Google/Apple Maps or booking hotels, etc. through this connection. The only thing I miss is having Hotspot capabilities, even at the reduced speeds.

EDGE is consistently, unbearably slow for me. If the phone has negotatiated EDGE, you should be getting EDGE speeds, which has a maximum bandwidth of 236 Kbit/s (theoretically up to 473.6 Kbit/s according to Wikipedia). That's not fast. I occasionally get reduced to EDGE on the Berlin subway, and I barely get Hacker News up.

(LTE has a maxmimum of about 450 Mbit/s, but in practice it's closer to 15-50 Mbit/s down, maybe half that up.)

Maybe someone who knows mobile technology could chime in.

In my experience, it's usually LTE but speed capped.

I am a big fan of Google Fi. It's $10/GB pretty much everywhere in the world. Really great if you are hopping around to different countries. Also you can get additional data only sims for no charge.

I used T-Mobile for a trip in the past and found it to be pretty frustrating.

it's actually LTE, just rate limited. With t-mobile one plus, you'll peg it at its max of 256kbps (or 32KB/s). While that's painfully slow for web browsing, it works perfectly fine for online taxis, directions with maps and even e-mail and chatting. i.e. anything that uses the internet passively.

"Perfectly fine" has not been my experience anywhere. A months ago I arrived in Oslo from the airport, and tried both Uber and the local transit ticket app, and both were impossible — everything just timed out — so I ended up hailing a cab the old way. You'd think the connection would be slow but that it would eventually get you there, but that has not been my experience.

i've used it in turkey and israel without a problem within the past few months, web browsing was mostly a no go, but passive things worked.

One thing that I would add is that you have to really internalize what it means to have a severely rate limited connection. You have to control your sync settings. if you just landed and all your services are trying to sync, you'll be using all the bandwidth and everything wont work.

T-Mobile's free roaming worked great for me when visiting Russia earlier this year. WhatsApp text messages, email, Google and Yandex maps, taxis, schedules etc. were all completely usable. Particularly funny since I was getting good connectivity far in the countryside, in the woods, in the sort of area where in the USA one might expect no coverage from any provider.

Uploading photos was a pain point though, and a major one: 2-5 minutes per image.

Not me. I actually got locked into my existing plan through a recent add-a-line-for-free promotion. The gotcha there being that if/when you change your plan, the free line stops being free. For the moment my current plan is still the best fit for my needs, but that's likely to change sooner or later, and now I have this additional barrier to consider when contemplating switching it up.

That extra line for free was a nice deal. Im using it as a backup "office" phone. it's the number I give to anything that might be public record, such as dns or my llc docs.

This is part of the race to the bottom. Price matters. That's why I switched to TMobile.

I'm T-Mobile subscriber, I can tell you that their service su.cks. Low signal issue. Call disruptions etc. planning to switch back to att.

Same issues i have. I love the lower price point but the service is sh*t.

As a T-Mobile subscriber, I face none of the problems you mention. I am on the walmart plan and it's been working great for many years now.

It's highly dependent on where in the country you are. Its not ubiquitous like Verizon is.

Idk why people are downvoting you for having a different experience

Reply on news.ycombinator.com