Hacker News Reader

Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

> “It is clear that doing everything we are doing and just doing it faster is not enough to deliver on these changing customer expectations going forward,” he said in the memo.

So getting rid of 5,000 (out of 70,000) employees will help deliver on customer expectations?

View on HN

> So getting rid of 5,000 (out of 70,000) employees will help deliver on customer expectations?

I'm a T-Mobile customer via Sprint acquisition. My experience post merger is that they simple view customers as monthly payments that T-Mobile is entitled to, service delivered, or not. They do not back the equipment they sell, they make it nearly impossible to bring your own phone (if you are on a former Sprint contract), and their people have zero discretion to do the right thing. It's a dystopian hellscape.

This sounds like AT&T and Verizon, too.

It's true for any big business. That's why real competition is necessary (greater than 6 participants, IMO, though there is probably some math formula to calculate ideal market participants).

I think this is true as a general principle only for corporations doing B2C.

I work for a mega corp and at least my business unit has some pretty good customer support. We work with business customers only. Maybe it helps when your client is purchasing equipment for millions of dollars and the relationships last decades.

Is it really that true for your power company?

I'm guessing you don't have more than 7 options.

Power companies are regulated as an alternative to competition.

Luckily everyone let the Tmo/Sprint merger go through.

True but T-Mobile's whole spiel is that they are the "uncarrier" completely different than those legacy carriers.

Turns out, that might not be true.

The uncarrier stopped being a thing as soon as the old CEO, John Legere, left. That was the only time it felt cool. Mike is ruining that legacy, and now has plans that are more expensive than AT&T or Verizon. Only good thing is that their prices are inclusive of taxes and fees.

The "Uncarrier" spiel died even before the shillmaster Legere left the company. Operationally they've always been a disaster, and then they acquired Sprint, whose super power was operational incompetence.

Apparently from other comments, they're the uncarrier because they "uncare" about customers, and they don't actually bother delivering service.

> make it nearly impossible to bring your own phone (if you are on a former Sprint contract)

I had no issues switching to a new, unlocked iPhone.

> I had no issues switching to a new, unlocked iPhone.

I had to buy an unlocked iPhone, and call in 7 times before I got a CSR who would allow me to move my number to it.

Did they allow you to keep your existing Sprint contract terms while doing so?

> Did they allow you to keep your existing Sprint contract terms while doing so?

Even worse: I cannot change to an equivalent T-Mobile plan.

Yes, but my old phone was also an unlocked iPhone, so it was harder to play games around usage or subsidies.

They’re desperate to juice margins. Same reason autopay discount is lost if you don’t switch from credit card to ACH payments.

T-mobile: (data breach noises)

Also T-mobile: Give us your bank account info.

Yeah, no.

Well, their customers probably have pretty low expectations from T-mobile.

Customer service is meh but the mobile service is great (even works on the Playa at burning man). I’m paying $150/month for 10 lines, and have been with them for 23 years. Of course, due to their data breaches, my email address with them is an alias and my physical address is my mail processor. Money goes in (I prepay a year at a time with a credit card), mobile service comes out. Prepaid service would mean they collect and retain less data, but you get lower priority on towers.

If you need service occasionally where TMO doesn’t provide, I recommend a Visible (Verizon MVNO subsidiary) eSIM.

My experience with t-mobile service is that it has the worst coverage (western states) out of all the big players.

I'll routinely have no signal on my t mobile work phone while my verizon personal phone is just fine.

Same. Oregon has the worst T-Mobile coverage in the country. Something like half the state has no coverage. That's fine for the uninhabited areas but I will drop coverage between my house and the grocery store and I live in a Portland suburb.

My wife's employer gave her a Sprint/T-Mobile phone and it doesn't work when she's in the office.

With some insider knowledge, I can definitely say that their “coverage” maps, at least in the western US, are complete and utter bullshit. They don’t actually measure coverage for those maps, they just use signal propagation models like longley-rice, with wildly optimistic parameters and extremely low resolution terrain data and almost no built environment data. Now there are people shitting their pants due to a drive-test requirement (literally driving around and measuring signal strength) of a rural data speed commitment that came from the sprint merger. They’ve been telling people for years that there is coverage where there is literally nothing.

Comcast was caught lying about their coverage:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/comcast-gave-fal...

I wonder if there are similar FCC requirements for cellular companies?

Probably, but I suspect like all captured regulators, they'd impose a penalty of a sternly-worded letter and a wag of the finger, and a "firm request" that they stop lying no later than 2033.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com