And this is why competition and effective government regulation[1] are fantastic things. If T-Mobile wasn't in a distant fourth place in the US market, or if they'd been acquired by AT&T we wouldn't be seeing this, nor would we see Verizon and AT&T introduce their own versions of T-Mobile's JUMP program.
>If T-Mobile wasn't in a distant fourth place in the US market, or if they'd been acquired by AT&T we wouldn't be seeing this, nor would we see Verizon and AT&T introduce their own versions of T-Mobile's JUMP program.
I'm not an economist, and I haven't looked into the details of the cell phone market in depth, but here's a possible alternative opinion. I'm not asserting that this is the case; just wondering if it might be.
Would T-Mobile be able to treat customers as well if they were more popular, or are they only in this position because their ratio of customers to cell towers, spectrum, and other capital is lower? And if the latter is true, isn't that an inefficient use of resources, which market forces (i.e. the merger) would have corrected if not for government intervention?
Ostensibly, VZW and AT&T enjoy certain economies of scale above and beyond T-Mobile given their significantly greater customer bases. T-Mobile has a perception of shitty service, which means they have to spend a metric shit-ton of money buying spectrum and building out their LTE network.
Do note that T-Mobile USA paid $225 million in "Interest expense to affiliates." The affiliate, in this case, is Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile.
If this had been structured as preferred equity rather than debt, then it would turn into dividends and move "below the line" on the income statement. T-Mobile USA would then magically be making a profit.
And of course, you're just looking at one quarter: Q2 2013. Q1 2013 was profitable. Q1 + Q2 was also profitable.
T-Mobile USA is not out of the woods yet. But they're in better shape than they were in 2011.
Sounds like that failed takeover bid was the 2nd best thing that AT&T did for US mobile customers in recent history (the iPhone deal with their Cingular subsidiary being the most impactful).
This is not really a prime example of good competition. The only reason T-Mobile can do this is because they are basically getting a massive subsidization from the German mother company, the German Telecom, who is behaving in its German home market just like AT&T behaves in the USA. As soon as T-Mobile gains any significant market share it will be just like the others.
The U.S consumer benefits regardless. if the German taxpayer or German customer of a monopoly subsidizes the U.S consumer that is a German market issue.
Your second point has some merit though: that once they gain significant market share in the U.S, T-mobile can become anti-customer. But T-mobile's prepaid plans and now this international texting gambit might force other carriers to follow suit before T-mobile gets to that significant market share. At that point T-mobile cannot afford to become anti-customer because other carriers would have started matching T-mobile's pro-customer offers in the meantime.
think of this as microsoft and sony taking a hit for every console they sell. It's anti-competitive because other console manufacturers can't do that.
in the end, you end up with a result like in politics. Whoever has more money wins the whole market.
The market pretty much exchanged short term benefits (cheaper console, better phone plans) for worse longer term problems (lame games because you have no choice, more expensive phone plans because you have no choice)
Ah, it was always my understanding that Microsoft and Sony did take a hit selling their console, and made the money back in things like controllers and games. Do they make a profit on the console itself now?
If the gov't didn't have its hand in this space for so long, there would be no massive AT&T and there would be way more innovation. You're cheering someone for applying a cast when they also broke the leg.
> If the gov't didn't have its hand in this space for so long, there would be no massive AT&T
I didn't expect to see revisionism in here, let alone of such magnitude.
Without government intervention, there would be no AT&T, nor would there be alternate carriers. There would only be Ma Bell.
And don't bullshitting about Ma Bell's regulated monopoly, the regulation was put in place because Bell was already a monopoly by the time 1934 rolled around.
How about no Ma Bell in the first place... Grampa Graham got his telephone patent in 1876 then in the next 18 years there were 600 lawsuits to defend over 900 patents (state grants of monopoly).
When these patents expired, there were soon 80 competing companies which captured 5% of the market, rising to over 3,000 companies with over 50% of the market by 1900.
AT&T then lobbied for its monopoly status back, saying the telephone "by the nature of its technology would operate most efficiently as a monopoly providing universal service."
Then during WW1, this monopoly was given "for reasons of national security". If you think that the monopoly came about by market forces then government came to save us, yes there is some revision needed.
> When these patents expired, there were soon 80 competing companies which captured 5% of the market, rising to over 3,000 companies with over 50% of the market by 1900.
And starting in 1907 and the return of Vail, Bell started massively buying them out, attracting the attention of the Justice Department and leading to the Kingsbury Commitment. Kingsbury was essentially repealed 8 years later by the Willis Graham Act, which more or less removed the Commitment's regulatory barriers for acquisition by AT&T, by shifting all oversight to the ICC's rubber-stamping.
> Then during WW1, this monopoly was given "for reasons of national security". If you think that the monopoly came about by market forces then government came to save us, yes there is some revision needed.
The monopoly was already there, Bell was temporarily nationalized during WW1.
> AT&T then lobbied for its monopoly status back, saying the telephone "by the nature of its technology would operate most efficiently as a monopoly providing universal service."
And this was given in 1921 by the Willis-Graham, which removed the regulatory hurdles put in place in 1913 when Bell was already a monopoly or near-monopoly.
> Bell got big and stayed big because of gov't intervention.
That is some pretty serious misreading, Bell got big and stayed big regardless of government intervention, the government tried to keep control of it after being put before the fait accompli (before trying to break the company in '84, as you may have noticed that didn't quite work either)
Because the patent was not the only thing that created the monopoly, nor was the the most important thing in sustaining the monopoly over telecommunication services at that time. Given the nature of how the tech worked, a monopoly provider was inevitable. The patent only dictated that the name of the monopoly provider was AT&T instead of Western Union.
Would kind of like to see Softbank merge up Sprint and T-Mobile US (if it could be purchased), to give them even greater scale to put serious competitive pressure on AT&T / VZ. Softbank is good at attacking entrenched markets, the more market leverage they have the better.
That could be a short term challenge since Sprint is all CDMA and T-Mo is all GSM. Wouldn't have any short term benefits, but the long term could be big.
T-Mobile's policies over the past couple of years have really made me want to become a customer. Plans that are actually reasonably priced, explicitly calling out handset subsidies and making them optional, and now this. I just wish their network was a little better!
I just switched in April after hating life with AT&T and deciding to put my money where my mouth was.
In cities - their coverage is VERY good. Countryside & cross country road trips are where they fall off the map, but I've been very happy paying $80 for unlimited call/text/data + No B.S.
T-Mobile is way behind in terms of users & they know it - which means they're making strong plays against the competition. Makes me want to bet on them for no other reason than to force the other carriers to step up their game.
Your report matches my impression of their coverage. I head out of the city just often enough to go with a carrier that has better coverage. I've thought about getting some cheap plan on a better carrier for those occasions, but it's not quite worth the trouble. They're so close!
Worth noting - as part of the fall out with the AT&T deal - they got a ton of bandwidth from AT&T and they're putting it to good use across their spectrum. Not quite on par with AT&T/Verizon - but getting there!
Ive had tmobile for the past 4 years, across 4 different smart phones.I can honestly say that i don't have any bad experiences with them. I find their network fast and reliable, and I don't live in a big city. I'm amazed they aren't more populatlr given how cheap and reliable ive found them to be.
I'm always worried that someone at T-Mobile will notice that plan, say "whoa, how did that get there?", and delete it. It's just so much cheaper than everything else on the market.
The plan can only be deliberate, egregious price discrimination. I found out about it because T-Mobile was heavily advertising it on their website. So I tried to sign up. You can't do that; you have to either order a SIM card from them (which is free), or get one from Walmart. I tried to get a SIM card from the local T-Mobile store. They don't sell those. I ordered a SIM card online and had to wait a week. When it arrived, I activated it on (surprise!) the T-Mobile website. I guess you can do that after all.
Note that in ordering the SIM card I did not indicate that I wanted any particular plan. The $30 plan just "happened" to be available for that card.
Was I willing to wait for one week in order to lower the bill for a large recurring cost by 40%? Yes. But T-Mobile seems to be gambling that most people aren't.
Actually SIMs aren't free, they're normally $10. You can sometimes find them for $1 if you look around hard enough [1].
I've been using this plan for about a month or so and coverage has indeed been a little spotty in my area but it's good enough for my needs. If you do want to try it out here's a tip port your number: do NOT do select the option to port during the online activation process. Sign up and activate your SIM FIRST and then call in to initiate a number port request. Once you've activated and signed up for the $30 plan with a port request, there's no way to get a temporary number while waiting for the port request to complete.
I consider $10 with a $10 discount (applied before payment) "free". I ordered straight through T-Mobile's web site. Yes, I may have actually paid some amount under a dollar, and no, I didn't pay more than a dollar. I'm still willing to call it "free".
Wow I've been overpaying by going into a store. I use T-Mobile pay as you go whenever I come to the States (twice a year for 2-week stints usually).
Do you know if I buy a SIM card and activate it for that deal will I be able to let it lapse and then re-up it when I come back in 6 months? Or will I have to buy a new SIM card every time?
I was on that plan and let it expire. My account page still displays the plan, while noting that it's unfunded and I can't use it, so it seems that you can let it lapse and re-up. I've been curious whether that will still be true come the new year.
I have been living in London since 2011, so I let me old T-Mobile plan lapse. When I came back my SIM was dead, so I bought a pay-as-you-go SIM in the store. They told me if I don't top it up every 3 months it is not guaranteed to work. However after I am typically gone for six month cycles, and the last 2 times it was still active.
I'm very keen on trying this new plan though as $3/day on top of pay as you go is not a good value on a 2 week trip. I'd be very happy to just pay $30 and get a reasonable amount of mins/texts along with great data.
There's no device restrictions, plenty of people use this with Nexus 4s and the like. The catch is you can't get it in a T-Mobile store.
If you bring your own device, you have to either buy a SIM from T-Mobile.com and then put it in the device, or you can buy a SIM card kit from Wal-Mart.
I have this on my Nexus 4. You can either order a sim online or (as I couldn't buy it with a card registered to a P.O. box) buy a 20$ phone at walmart and swap the sim into your device.
Most of the time the guy at the Walmart phone store will have a spare SIM card lying around and will give it to you for free. That happened for both my phone and my wife's phone.
As much as I love T Mobile's policies, I hate their coverage. I get 0 bars inside non-wood buildings, but when I step outside, I get a few bars. I live in a somewhat hilly area, so I get spotty reception in certain parts of town. I really wish they would spend more money trying to improve their coverage instead of telling everyone how they are so different. Because even if they are different, if they have poor coverage, they won't get a lot of customers.
If you don't mind me asking, where are you located? I get good T-Mobile reception inside all types of buildings in and around the Kansas City metro. The only place I've ever lost coverage is in the basement floors of my doctor's office away from windows.
I am currently in Charlottesville, VA (it is kind of like a suburb). It has a lot of hills, which affects the reception. Every carrier other than T-Mobile has signal boosters placed throughout the city to counteract spotty coverage.
I've noticed that I only have issues when I go into a building that's not made mostly out of wood. At McDonalds or something, I get great reception, but when I step into a lecture hall or a federal building, the reception drops to 0 bars. Immediately outside of it, the reception is fine.
Aside from getting a phone with a really strong antenna, I'm not sure what to do about this.
T-Mobile sounds great on paper but it's like selling sports cars for 1000$ and you don't know you just bought a Lada until you take it for a spin.
I drove from the Canadian east coast to California with a T-Mobile unlimited plan. For 90% of the trip, I was actually roaming on other carriers' networks. I derived zero value from my payment to T-Mobile since I can't actually use my phone except for 911. Now I'm in San Francisco for half a year and speed is around 0.05Mbps in about 30% of the city. And they're not uninhabited spots of town either.
I can only speak for San Francisco, but that sounds like an issue with your phone, not t-mobile. Make sure your phone supports LTE and HSPA+ on the right spectrums. My experience with T-mobile in SF has been nothing short of superb, on an unlocked iPhone 5. Super-fast low-latency everywhere I go.
It's comforting to know there's hope :)
Forgot to mention I tried it on half a dozen latest gen phones and even a couple of SIM cards from T-Mobile just to make sure. Even my phone plan was refreshed in the backend to make sure it wasn't some accounting/admin related issue. The radio frequencies probably isn't the problem but it might not be a general issue that appears to 100% of their user base. Just gotta figure out why the hate me :D
I have the same experience on a daily basis. I get no service to a maximum of 1 bar standing next to a window at home and the same sitting at my desk at work (which happens to be next to a nice, big window). Couple that with dead zones on the commute to work, and I spend almost 100% of my day with little to no service. And no, I do not live in the middle of nowhere; I live a tad bit north of Chicago. AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all have fantastic service here. I'm trying to get out of my legacy contract with T-Mobile over this, but they want to charge me $300 to terminate.
T-Mobile can throw in as many features as they want, but if I can't reliably make a call from home or work, then it's useless to me.
I live in Schaumburg and work in the west loop in Chicago. I have no problems whatsoever with T-Mobile reception or data speed wise anywhere in the Chicago area, and I'm on a Galaxy Nexus.
I also have a Galaxy Nexus, and I had the same problems when I tried out the Nexus 4. Apparently The near-north suburbs are just not as well covered, even thought T-Mobile's coverage map shows pretty much perfect coverage.
I just got an Aio Wireless SIM card to try out for a month, and it's awesome. I even get service in the elevators and the parking garage. I finally feel like I'm living in modern times!
I rarely leave the city, so the lack of coverage in rural areas doesn't bother me. In NYC I have to say I've noticed a small improvement in reception over AT&T - buildings where I've been dead in the water before now have some connectivity.
So far so good, this new announcement is just icing on the cake, especially as a Canadian expat. It used to be that when visiting home I'd inevitably wind up with one helluva phone bill, and that's just with extremely minimal texting and calling just to herd cats.
Outside in Greeley Square a week or 2 ago: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/646728668. I just did one at work inside a tall building (9:15AM ET) with 2 dots of LTE coverage and got 32 ms ping, 5 down/5 up.
I've used T-Mobile for about 10 years total. I've also used Sprint for two years. I live in the city so my reception is pretty much identical to every other mobile service as long as I'm in the city. When I leave the city, T-Mobile is not as good as my friends who have Verizon, but then again they are frequently paying close to twice what I pay. I figure that if I can get good service 99% of the time while living in a city and deal with lesser service that 1% of the time I'm not in the city, that is a compromise that I'm glad to pay much less for.
Plans that are actually reasonably priced, explicitly calling out handset subsidies and making them optional
This has actually been the norm in UK for quite some years. Look on t-mobile.co.uk for example, they have a SIM Only plans. As an example:
> The Full Monty (SIM Only), £26/month on 12 month contract = unlimited talk, text + data
> iPhone 5c 16GB, £42/month on 24 month contract = unlimited talk, text + data, £30 for phone
So the same plan, the iPhone effectively costs you £414. That't not actually a bad price, esp if you consider it as finance. But not everyone wants a new phone, e.g. maybe your iPhone 5 is still "good" and you want to wait for the iPhone 6 to come out in a year...
I was a T-Mobile customer for years, and liked my experience very much. The only reason I am not a customer right now is because I had been traveling to China quite a bit and needed a provider that I could access over there.
As soon as this contract is over or work is no longer paying, I am switching back.
I left T-Mobile when at&t was offering better plan. The only thing I wish all carriers will do is eliminate minute deduction for calling your friend who isn't in your network.
Do they already have that for daytime? I think for most carriers out there, if not, all, night time is minute free.
T-Mobile's plans are all unlimited talk and text now. The only difference is the amount of high-speed data (after which you still get EDGE data access).
I switched a few months ago and it's been great. I was afraid I was going to have to switch away, since we're going to be out of the country a lot next year. I'm super happy to be able to stick with them now.
> While the data is free, it won't be particularly fast. Customers can expect network speeds at around the same level that they get in the US after they are throttled. Chief Marketing Officer Mike Sievert said the average speed customers would get would be around 128 kilobits a second.
Think of it more of an extension of the Kindle 3G business model rather than anything else. The maximum one could theoretically suck through that straw, at 24/7, is 40 GB a month.
That still sounds pretty reasonable, considering that at normal roaming-data prices, that 40 GB would cost you about $10,000. Between a speed cap and insane prices, I'll take the speed cap!
128kbps is pretty slow, but it's fine for basic use. That's basically a mediocre EDGE connection like the original iPhone without great coverage, and while it was no speed demon, it was certainly usable. It'll let you send instant messages, and check your e-mail and get directions if you're patient. I could easily see surviving on a plan like this while traveling.
I've been in Canada for a year using my UK phone, so I only get Edge due to the different bands. Surprisingly, I have survived and I didn't think I would. Sure things take longer to load and I can't really stream YouTube but you learn to live with it and you can always pick up wifi in a lot of cafes and restaurants to send images and files. But, I can send/receive my emails, use Tango/WhatsUp/Skype to instant message, Facebook, browse the web etc. It's more than adequate, you can work around the limitations fairly easily. I'm also on a limited data plan (500MB month) so at faster speeds I would hit that limit very quickly!
I will be buying a Nexus 5 when it comes out though :)
For me, that's not the painful part. The painful part is the six week limit.
When I was in Taiwan, I was handed a prepaid dumbphone and a 4G wireless hotspot with iffy battery life and some indoor coverage issues.
Being able to send/receive SMSs and brief phone calls with my smartphone's home number, and keep up on email and light browsing on my own phone without being at the mercy of the hotspot, would have been very nice, but I was there for ~9 months split into two trips during the course of a year.
I would gladly pay an extra $10-20/month (with $0.20/minute voice) for such capability over an extended period, but that wasn't, and apparently still is not, an option.
I think that the case T-Mobile is going for is not the person who lives in another country for long periods of time for work but the traveller who has to constantly go back and forth between areas, or just a frequent vacationer.
I imagine it's just better for you to get your own plan if you're spending 3/4 of the year there.
Getting my own plan was a legal impossibility, and would have done little to help anyone in the US get hold of me.
car's suggestion is at least an interesting half-solution. I didn't even consider a T-Mobile "wi-fi calling" phone at the time, as I'd been under the impression, right up until today, that T-Mobile had only had that feature for a couple years before abandoning it.
If you get one of the Blackberry UMA models or a T-Mobile branded phone with 'Wifi calling', those phones will work over Wifi anywhere in the world, at no extra cost.
In other words, you can make and receive voice calls on your regular number, and the same for SMS via WLAN.
I would be willing to pay for this service here in the US for a reasonable price. There are plenty of things I would love a low-end data plan for, but can't justify the cost of $45/mo for prepaid data at 1.5GB/mo like Net10 offers. Think of electronics projects that could benefit from an anywhere, always on connection even if it's super slow. But is that project worth $45/mo, and is it worth it if you run out of data before the end of the month?
Had. [EDIT: Er, Have. With apologies, see below discussion.]
I'm paying $25/mo for a limited no-contract BYOB plan. They're still taking my money for it, but I'm a little scared, since I can no longer find it on the site.
Over the last six months, I've seen T-Mobile BYOD plans at $15, 25, 30, 35, 45, and up. Now, you can't get any plan from T-Mobile under $50 per month, and that "cheap" plan comes with less high speed data than they've typically offered for less.
They're killing the value of the plans while rebranding throttling as "unlimited" so it sounds like a perk. "Yeah, use all of our awful throttled data you like. Be our guest!"
Someone should put the old plans, like the one you link to, side by side with the new ones. I don't think so many people would still think this is a win for consumers or competition.
* I've found 1.5 GB is more than enough for email, Wikipedia, and the rare voice call - if I'm settled in somewhere to watch Netflix, I always seem to have wifi.
I just called in to activate this plan (I'm already on a prepaid TMO plan). I couldn't get it on the phone, but the CSR told me that I could order the activation kit from walmart.com, call in, and activate it using the code from the kit. The code can be applied to either a new line or an existing line. The kit sells for ~$30 but includes $30 of service.
T-Mobile isn't exactly going out of its way to let people know this exists. It's not featured in the way you do for a plan you envision as the future cornerstone of the business.
I have this plan. Had to call customer service to get them to honor it. Bit of a hassle, but they did it. It's not available in their regular plan settings; clearly they'd rather people buy the more expensive plan with unlimited minutes instead. I won't be particularly surprised if they discontinue it at some point soon. For the time being, the plan meets my needs quite well though.
$30/mo for 5GB 4G (then I assume 2G after) is quite a deal! If the minutes were higher, I'd use this as my primary provider. As a data-only plan though, that's not too bad!
Yes. It is quite a deal. I pay .10 per minute after the small allocation is used up, but I've only use all 100 minutes twice in the last year I've had this plan.
If I were less lazy and needed more minutes, I'd setup grooveip (or something similar) with my google voice account.
I use my phone quite a bit due to having a widely dispersed family and an upcoming wedding. I also occasionally use my phone for work, but do not get reimbursed for the cost. You have this plan? Do they do the "nights and weekends free" thing? Do they charge for "in network" calls?
I'm actually seriously thinking about switching, as my Net10 experience is sub-par compared to an actual carrier, and $30/mo is better than $45/mo no matter how you split it. 100 minutes is just too low for me, though. I love my Windows Phone, but that means no Google Voice or realistic VOIP offering.
Me: On a plan that says "First N GB at 4G speeds", what
speed do I get after I hit the cap?
Rep: Once the allotted high-speed data has been used
speeds will be throttled down to our 2G speeds.
This would be comparable to about twice the speed
of dial-up which translates to about 100 kbps.
T-Mobile has realized exactly what a carrier is supposed to be and ironically named it "Uncarrier". No more subsidizing phones, no more contracts, just a pipe. We will move data between your phone and the world for a flat fee and that is the end of the story. I switched to T-Mobile about a month ago because I agree with their business practices and want to support their growth.
Good to hear. US carriers do a terrible job of dealing with anything international. It's as though they're honestly surprised that anybody would ever want to leave the USA or make a phone call to anybody in another country.
An example: I flew to the 'states this weekend. Once on the ground, I topped up my American (T-Mobile) sim with a month's worth of credit. (There was no way to do this from abroad since their sims don't work there at all, and their website has a ridiculous country redirect even from your account page).
At the airport, on the way home, I sent a text to my wife letting her know I was on the way. It failed.
I tried again to various permutations of the French number, with absolutely no success. Googling around, it seems that you can't do that with t-mobile. You can't even get them to turn it on, since their "international" packages only work with their contract services. Not just roaming, but even placing a phone call to another country is impossible with pre-paid t-mobile. Sure enough, landing in Paris, the phone was dead dead dead. No "welcome to France" message. No extortionate international roaming charges. Just no ability to make calls at all.
I had to pop my UK sim back in just to be able to use the phone again.
I'm looking forward to the first company (in any country) that truly gets all this. They'll get my business, as well as pretty much all the business from anybody who travels at all.
Vodafone (UK) are awesome within Europe - when I am abroad I pay £2.50/day to use my normal price plan abroad (so I still get unlimited minutes/texts, and 6GB data, for no cost other than that daily fee). For calling European numbers they aren't quite as good, but for £5/month the prices drop from £1/min to between 5p and 20p/min depending on the type of number I'm calling.
Outside Europe they're still awful though, something like £1.50/min to call to America/Asia from UK, and same for both placing and receiving calls when in those continents.
Last time I was in America I picked up a cheap phone at a supermarket that gave me 1c/min phonecalls to anywhere in the US or even abroad - including calling UK mobile phones. That saved me a lot of money.
Think the trick to overseas is to get a local pre-paid SIM card, and use that number locally. As pre-paid SIM cards are getting more pervasive around the world, normally this works out as the cheapest option. Naturally, there are some countries where purchasing a pre-paid SIM is near impossible, or costly enough that sticking to roaming with your current provider works out cheaper.
Agreed, that's essentially what I was doing in the US, I just got it with a cheap phone too so I could keep my normal blackberry up and running with my UK number.
But stuff like the Vodafone deal within Europe are awesome, as it saves the hassle of needing either two phones or sim swapping.
I do the same. Cheap phone for local calls, and my normal phone for calls to/from home. What frustrates me is that even though dual-SIM phones have been around for years, no Western service provider will sell them, so none of the more popular smart phones support it.
Check out EE roaming; it's competitive with Vodafone (one of the reasons I moved to them). £5/month for unlimited roaming minutes/texts in EU, US and others. Data is reasonable value @ £25/GB and lasts a month. Importantly includes places like the US, Australia, Russia, China, India etc ....
Three got a little bit better - no roaming charges whatsoever in a number of European countries (i.e. no data cap on my plan). It was really handy to not have to worry about loading google maps and local websites while out and about in Italy this summer. Hopefully the list of countries will keep increasing.
Three actually recently announced a similar thing to this, whereby you take your contract with you to any country that Three operates in, i.e. Australia, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Hong Kong and the Republic of Ireland. Other European countries and you still have to pay their standard European roaming charge...
> Good to hear. US carriers do a terrible job of dealing with anything international. It's as though they're honestly surprised that anybody would ever want to leave the USA or make a phone call to anybody in another country.
Your case is a little different but in general it's a huge stream of free revenue for the carriers. Very few people pick their plan based on international roaming. People don't roam internationally very often. Those that do are likely on a business plan and much less sensitive to price. No one has any idea what it costs so they can use very opaque pricing schemes.
As the article says, AT&T and VZW are making 90% margin on their international business which you'd think would make it ripe for competition. But since almost no one purchases their plans based on the international roaming fees there hasn't been much going on.
This is great. I had an incident in Belize this year where I turned off airplane mode to connect to wifi on the boat I was on and my cellular radio auto-connected to Belize's local mobile carrier without me realizing (I had international roaming enabled on my account). My phone started syncing and updating apps in the background and within 2 minutes of passive usage I had amassed $270 in data charges. Only. 2. Minutes.
I plead my case when I got back to the states and they removed the charges without a thought (although I had to send in a written appeal). International data rates are ridiculous and it's nice to see a carrier acting rationally.
To avoid this (common) issue, EU regulations now mandate a roaming-fee cutoff at €50 until the account-holder positively indicates their knowledge and acceptance of additional roaming fees. They can also pre-authorize a higher cutoff if they really do expect to be incurring more than €50 in roaming fees and don't want to be cut off, but this must be an explicit opt-in (not the default terms of a data plan). The result is that your losses in the case of unexpected data syncing are at least limited by default. But only within the EU, of course.
That was a big portion of the basis of my appeal; a carrier shouldn't allow charges to be compounded that high and that fast. There were alert SMS messages stating my data charges balance, but the $50, $100, and $200 alerts all arrived at the exact same time, literally all had the same timestamp. If I had been capped at $50 and then prompted in order to continue, I would have paid the fee and learned my lesson.
exact same thing happened to me in belize to the tune of $1500. i checked with AT&T before my trip and they assured me that belize was covered per my international plan, but then backtracked and told me they specifically said it wasn't covered when i disputed the bill. i clearly remember the call as i was deciding between buying a local sim and just using at&t's roaming plan. lesson learned: always get a local sim. it's cheaper.
I did a bunch of traveling earlier this year and getting local SIM card is pretty easy and cheap (~$20/mo), and has the advantage of allowing local calls. In Bangkok and Kyiv you can get them at any 7-11 or electronics store. Philippines and Prague it was a visit to a carrier. The rough patch was Tokyo, but you can rent a mobile hotspot for a reasonable amount and have it delivered to the airport.
If you're only there for a few days, free roaming is very nice to have, but if you're there a week or more I think it's worth the small effort to get the local SIM. That also allows me to keep Straight Talk prepaid in the US with my own phone. YMMV, but this was the most economical, flexible route for me.
I switched to t-mobile from Verizon. I have actually been really happy with the service. My plan is unlimited data 5 gigs of 4g data/unlimited 3g and 100 minutes of talk time for $30 a month. Every extra minute is .10 over the 100 minutes. So my plan ends up being $50 a month. But compare that to any other carrier and its a much better price. Also, I like that it's a German company and didn't sell out like Verizon giving 1,000,000+ members phone numbers to the NSA.
It has no useful relationship to reality. It relies on a self-selecting group of people to download and run their app to collect data, and then presents that data in what I'm sure is a precise but utterly inaccurate form.
If you believe it, there is no signal from any carrier at either my current home in Washington, nor my previous home in Santa Clara. And there is certainly no T-Mobile, AT&T, or other GSM carrier signal to be found anywhere near my current home (my AT&T iPhone stubbornly insists on working regardless).
I'm on a month long trip to Asia right now (today: Sendai), and remembering why I used to keep a tmobile blackberry and BES just for travel. Flat rate $80/mo unlimited edge to the BES (which I used for email and then tunneling IP from my laptop) was worth it even when I only used it one or two months a year; absolutely worth it when I was overseas full time. Sadly I let it lapse and am now playing the "find a local LTE dongle" game, which in Japan is a JPY 1260/day old Huawei LTE android device on SoftBank which is the 5th phone and 8th computing device I'm lugging around on trains and such.
Seriously going to look at MVNO options when I get back; running a pro privacy, pro customer MVNO, ideally based in a country with strong privacy laws, and handsets transparently configured to be safe for customers (even when the local carrier is turning over data..) would be pretty fun.
This will be amazing in Europe. From jan In Eu all carriers have to drop roaming charges and people now are traveling exponentially more than they used to 10-15 years ago. This is big. I know everyone focuses on USA and china bit old continent still has potential ;)
I wonder if they have added more roaming agreements to their network. Last time I was in Norway, there was no coverage at all -- no network, no calls, never mind Internet access -- which I found strange. Usually you will be able to connect to via local network and pay for roaming charges. Norway is all GSM, same frequency band, and my plan has International calling, but I still had to swap out the SIM card for my Norwegian one. Could be a fluke, of course. Edit: Or it may be that pay-as-you-go doesn't provide international roaming.
I love T-Mobile's approach, and the whole reason I use them is because they are the underdog who's doing things a little differently.
I was in Norway as well and I did not get any reception on my T-Mobile phone until I contacted the account holder on our family plan (they were still in the US) and had them add international roaming to our post-paid plan. Immediately afterwards my phone was able to connect to a network, so I think roaming with T-Mobile is opt-in.
It does provide international roaming. At least in the Netherlands I have no problem using my pay-as-you-go plan. However, I had exactly your experience in China: I could only make emergency calls.
Ah, all this roaming here there everywhere discussion reminds me of one of my fundamental wishes for a new startup to tackle: create a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) which essentially just roams everywhere (including the home country) but always picks the strongest signal of all available wireless carriers.
I hate to be in an area and not have coverage. I carry another prepaid sim card around just for that case but obviously that's a different number then. I'll be happy to pay a premium if that was available.
And then maybe one day we can also get rid of the sim cards and just do it in software... I don't get why we still have sim cards.
I have been quite pleased to see T-Mobile continuing to provide AT&T and Verizon with some competition. I sampled T-Mobile for a couple of months with their $30 unlimited data/text plan and was pleasantly surprised with the performance in the LA area - on a Nexus 4 (without LTE), speeds were generally better than on AT&T. The only reason I finally went back to AT&T was for rural coverage, as I do enough traveling that this was an issue. Were it not for that, I would have gladly stayed with T-Mobile.
Okay, I was about to quit T-Mo this winter for Verizon, but I'll stick around a little longer. Points for effort. It's desperately needed to compensate for the shitty coverage.
% cat /tmp/tmobile_countries | sort | pbcopy
Aland Islands
Anguilla
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Aruba
Australia
Austria
Bahrain
Barbados
Belgium
Bermuda
Bolivia
Bonaire
Brazil
British Virgin Islands
Bulgaria
Cambodia
Canada
Cayman Islands
Chile
China
Christmas Island
Colombia
Costa Rica
Curacao
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominica
Dominican Republic
Easter Island
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Estonia
Faeroe Islands
Finland
France
French Guiana
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Grenadav Nicaragua
Guadeloupe
Guatemala
Guyana
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Kenya
Kuwait
Latvia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Malta
Martinique
Mexico
Moldova
Montserrat
Netherlands
Netherlands Antilles
New Zealand
Norway
Pakistan
Panama
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Qatar
Romania
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
Sint Maarten
Slovakia
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sri Lanka
St. Barthelemy
St. Kitts and Nevis
St. Lucia
St. Martin
St. Vincent & the Grenadines
Suriname
Svalbard
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Turks and Caicos Islands
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vatican City
Venezuela
Vietnam
Zambia
It'll certainly be huge step forward -- I sometimes go to Japan, and it's hard to find pay phones these days, and they make me jump through a lot of hoops getting prepaid phone there, if that's even possible as a foreigner...
I used b-mobile in Japan for a pre-paid data-only SIM earlier this year. They will even mail the SIM to the airport so it is waiting for you when you arrive.
The most interesting part about this to me is the $0.20/min voice price. Not because it would have a direct impact on me or anything like that, but mostly because it seems like in the US, carriers are falling over themselves to offer "unlimited voice" while restricting the data. This is the exact opposite.
This is a logical offer for them to make. Many of their customers will have unlocked phones, so they aren't in a position to force those customers to use overpriced international data plans (e.g. AT&T's $120 for 800MB/mo). The competition is the cheap nano-SIM card in the airport vending machine.
I'm not even sure you're going to be able to find that plan anymore. [EDIT: dangrossman's right, they still have this plan on the "prepaid" side, but you have to dig a bit. If you're a brand new customer to T-Mobile, you're not exactly going to stumble on it from the main page.] The website really looks like they're bumping everyone up to the $50+ plans, which is sad, because they owned the value data plan territory for a while.
Case in point, I'm currently paying them $25/mo for 1.5 GB of high speed data. No contract, BYOD. I originally thought I needed "unlimited" data, but found that if I just avoid videos until I'm around wifi (which I'm around way more often than I thought I would be), then I never touch the limit.
So how's the $50 per month for 500 MB high speed plus unlimited everything else compare?
Ting offers 500 MB for under $20 / mo, and you can even pay-as-you-go to save money, or cover overages at a reasonable rate. For $50 per month, Cricket gives you 2.5GB of 4G speeds per month, falling back to unlimited 3G speeds, 5GB for $60 or 10GB for $70. Neither are BYOD, though, which can be a deal killer.
T-Mobile had great pricing, but now they're just normalizing with the larger players like Sprint and AT&T, drifting away from the bargains offered by the mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), probably pulling the whole market upwards.
This is very interesting. 128kbit is fast enough for Google Maps which is good enough for me.
I know they said the free overseas data is only for contract customers but I wonder if they will allow us pre-paid people to add on the "packs" they mention before going on a trip.
This is huge. I recently spent ~$200 on AT&T's $30/120MB bundles on a two-week trip to Europe. I thought I was getting a good deal, too. It's fantastic to see the market shifting slightly in favor of the customers.
last time I was in Europe I got a sim from T-Mobile, pre-paid, loaded up with 25 EUR, and had 3 GB of data to use. Which is great because my grandparents on my dads side don't believe in getting internet access! Tethering my phone got me through without withdrawal symptoms ;-)
Really nice idea, and a good step forward. I was wondering, if this truly is an 'international' package deal, does this also mean it will be available 'internationally' at the start, instead of just the US?
Does this mean that as an Australian.. If i somehow managed to get a T-Mobile SIM and account I could use this for international travel? (Not expected to use it as the main sim in Australia though)
Just another marketing ploy by T-Mobile, their service and coverage isn't even close to their competitors. I see this as more of sign that things are crumbling.
I continue to be dumbfounded that intelligent people would call this "free". The degree to which marketing has invaded our everyday lives is astonishing.
It's not free, you're paying a monthly fee for it.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/19/att-tmobile-merger-dead/