Legere really turned around TMobile and changed the industry by getting rid of contracts and doing better prices.
Overall T-Mobile has the best bang for buck if you live in an area where they have coverage.
Although US carriers are sometimes quite behind what other countries offer. I am constantly blown away at how cheap and fast cellular internet is in India with Jio. Or south korea, or japan.
Asian countries make US look like a joke when it comes to internet speed and cellular technology.
If, like most people, you were buying a phone from your carrier, the cost at early termination was near identical. Verizon's ETF already reduced each month left on your phone's upgrade period, just like a phone payment plan would have.
Legere's a Jobsian marketing genius, but only because he managed to sell people the status quo as something new.
T-Mobile was very different and I hope it stays that way.
I was paying something like $50 for 2GB of high speed data, and "unlimited" data.
Except after the 2GB it was literally unusable, no matter the time of day or location. Even plain email would stop working, and webpages would never load.
A lot of unlimited plans will deprioritze you (slowing you down) after a limit, but usually that limit is higher, and even when you are deprioritized, it still remains useful most of the time.
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You can downvote all you want, they were running this scam well after the era of per MB overage fees.
In fact they’re still running this scam if you don’t manual switch to their more expensive “One” plan.
I'll acknowledge they market it a little misleadingly. But I'm a big fan of anything that removes bill-shock which was a fairly normal problem before T-Mobile got into the market (both for local data overages and international data usage).
I actually should have switched back but didn’t feel it was worth it the effort at the time.
Last month I cancelled and switched to Visible, which is an MVNO with unlimited data for 25$, there are similarly competitive networks out there now
> Yes, Party Pay is available to all active Visible members. Real (or chosen) families, roommates, frenemies, or total strangers just looking for some sweet savings.
I didn't have to look for 4 people, their subreddit has hundreds of links you can join for 4 people.
If anything was a colossal travesty, it was Legere bringing "unlimited" data back from the dead.
I can’t say what people should do, but they use their phones to watch video, do video chats, play games, upload and backup photos, etc.
A couple of years ago an American company I worked for had T-mobile phones with a plan that included the free international roaming. This international roaming was 2G data by default. In many countries we had to visit these data plans for internet access were simply unusable because they were so slow. Opening pages a browser would simply time out. This would happen in large countries China, Australia and many European countries as well. The company ended up ditching T-Mobile as a result. While it was free in the sense that it allowed them to advertise it as such it was not functional.
When the alternative is to simply pop a local SIM into your phone and get working internet for the same $15 dollars it costs for the T-Mobile One World Plan what's the point exactly?
- without data, find open store
- wait in line for counter service
- choose prepaid package/carrier
- passport copy/screen: gov + random store
- store "forgets" to return passport
- run out of data due to opaque billing
- repeatYou might as well add "having to breathe" and "tapping your debit card" to this list of hardhsips. This list is really quite laughable.
In many parts of the world you can get a SIM at a 24 hour convenience store and without a passport. And once you have the SIM you can almost always top them up on line. I think most people would consider the 5 minute time investment to be a fair tradeoff for working internet on their phone.
It's quite amusing to me that sharing my experience with a specific carrier's international roaming plan would upset someone. Are people actually T-Mobile fan boys? I mean it's a telecom company for heaven's sake. Telecom is one of the sleaziest industries there is. Who cares?! They're all different degrees of shit.
For a little context during a 3 years period I was spending a little over 200 days a year on the road internationally with a work issued T-Mobile phone during that time. My experience is not unique either. You can check https://community.t-mobile.com/
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffreymorrison/2018/02/07/how...
I'll give you a very real life example.
In 2015 my girlfriend needed to go on a long road trip. But her iPhone was dead toast.
Soooo we go to the Verizon store. The cheapest options were either to buy a 200$ 'flip' phone (not smartphone, just a flip phone) up front, or to get a new contract and lock in.
Mind you, By this time in 2015 it was very easy to find sub-75$ prepaid Android phones. In Brick and mortar stores. Hell Verizon even sold a couple, but you weren't allowed to bring them onto a postpaid plan (lol).
I wound up spending less than 100$ on a Lumia 521 (yeah, lol winphone, but the map app (HERE drive) had great offline map downloading support which suited her purpose,) and putting her on my TMO for a while.
If you looked at the top end of the market back then, yeah, there wasn't much real difference between what TMO did and a normal contract. But at the lower end of the market it made a huge difference, that's why TMO won so much of that market.
Most people bought a phone from their carrier because it was so heavily subsidized and the plans were so expensive. If you broke your phone, you were out a huge amount of money, AND you had an expensive plan to boot.
T-Mobile did the right thing and gave consumers an option.
T-Mobile just claimed their payment plan, which shafted you if you canceled service, wasn't an ETF (it is), and Verizon just said their early termination fee was part of the plan, though it was really paying off the rest of the phone (which it did). In both cases, you're paying off a phone you bought, and keeping it after ending service.
The only real difference was that in the past, you were "paying for the phone" on Verizon monthly even if you didn't actually upgrade/buy a phone from them. But since the vast majority of people buy phones from their carrier, it really impacted the bottom line very, very little. The HN crowd over-represents in the tiny group of people that would bring an outside phone to their carrier.
A change which materially impacts less than 5% of your customers isn't game-changing, but T-Mobile marketed it like it was important to 100% of their customers.
IMHO, not really - HN is niche compared to everyone who was using HowardForums to hack on their Motorola and Nokia phones back in the day, myself included. T-Mobile was on the 900/1800 (?) spectrum which matched Europe and other places you could buy eBay phones, and T-Mobile was always free and open to people doing this. You could call support and get someone to help you with adding the right APNs and whatnot, they were always the "un-carrier" to many of us.
As an international traveler, I've never even considered Verizon or Sprint as I would never be able to pop another SIM from a different country.
(Bear in mind, a SIM is really just a hardware manifestation of a unique identifier and some settings. It's not impossible to do these things entirely digitally, and now with eSIM, that is happening on GSM/LTE networks as well.)
There's also a lessened urgency to upgrade phones under the T-Mobile model. There's still the Jump program, for those who do want to keep on a trade-in cycle, but if you're happy with you're phone you get rewarded with a lower bill at the end for sticking with it until you aren't.
About half of all phones sold in the US are iPhones and probably more on the major carriers.
Apple sells a lot of phones both online and in their retail stores and have their own payment plans.
You can buy an unlocked phone from Apple and optionally have it registered with one if the major providers.