T-Mobile switches users to pricier plans and tells them it’s not a price hike
arstechnica.com
T-Mobile switches users to pricier plans and tells them it’s not a price hike::T-Mobile: "We are not raising the price... we are moving you to a newer plan."
I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it further.
No, no - that guy is (was, literally) the Verizon spokesman.
I did not know that, that is hillarious.
I'm on mint, and just waiting for T-Mobile to come after us. Nothing this beautiful can last.
When did they buy Mint?
About a year ago?
Thanks for not saying "look it up". We can't seem to keep anything nice. We were just about to leave for Mint. Do you like it?
I have mint: The connection sucks, you get deprioritized against other traffic so bandwidth is usually garbage. It's fine if you just need text and phone calls though.
Is that what’s going on? So often since I switched to Mint I’ll have full bars and can’t do anything online.
That's every third party lease phone service and the difference between paying for a company that owns their own towers or network like Verizon, t mobile, and at&t, compared to any of the ones like mint who just use the towers that any of the above carriers own. If you use anything like Mint, you get bumped to the bottom of the bandwidth availability.
Otherwise why would anyone pay more for the same service?
I think this experience might be region-dependant. I'm in a major city on Mint and I routinely see 900Mbps+ down and never have any issues with streaming. I think the lowest speed test I ever saw was around 200Mbps.
In my city 90% of the time it's perfectly fine. Then there are a few dead spots in the t mobile network that are really frustrating and I'm usually in those spots once a week.
Then I visited some family in Colorado and it was awful and my phone was essentially useless without Wi-Fi. T mobiles network is very hit or miss but no way am I paying $70 / month or whether the going rate for Verizon, etc.
I have mint too and haven't had much trouble with bandwidth. But to be fair I don't use my phone for very much while not on wifi, mostly just streaming music and Google maps.
I was worried about that since they buy access to towers, thank you for sharing your experience. Are able to see when that happens in a concrete way, or is more just the noticable lag?
I switched from T-Mobile to mint not long ago and only two things changed, how much and who I pay, but like he said they'll come for us soon enough now that they bought mint.
That's how it feels
Mint got sold when Ryan Reynolds needed more money to buy that soccer team
Ha, good point! They had to replace the entire pitch, twice!
Mints fine in my experience, but my time is almost up (december) and have been using them since 2018. Im considering moving onto US Mobile which offers better plans (and option of which towers you want to use, they offer tmobile or verison, so pick based on phone specs/area) or a Google fi family plan
Thx, I'll look into it, see if it's my area
If Verizon is good where you are look at us mobile. “Warp 5g” is Verizon. The gsm carrier they offer is T-Mobile. There’s also visible but they’re owned by Verizon.
I also have Mint - it’s fine. I pay $66 for 3 months at a time of 15gb data per month. It’s a little annoying you have to buy in 3 month increments using the family plan discount, but still way better than the 2 year contracts of most providers. My service experience has been alright - every once in while it’ll be slow on me but that’s pretty rare. I’d cautiously recommend it if you’re looking to switch. Worst case scenario you’re only out a few dollars if you don’t buy the year long plan.
I got in on a $45 for three months, unlimited everything. So far so good in LA, but I definitely get the “full bars but where’s my bandwidth?” at least once a day. They’ll put me on an unlimited everything for $120/3mos and I’m not sure I’d be happy with the slowdowns at that price.
tbf that "When did they buy Mint?" could just have easily been typed as a search query
You're right, I wrote it out, hit send them thought to myself, I should've googled that. But, it was in the ether already, and we're trying to build a bigger community through interactions. So it was a win-win as I see it. Plus it got us talking, too.
T-mobile: hello sir we are calling about your plan and a way you can save money
Me: that isn't true
T-mobile: umm we can save you money by changing your plan
Me: that statement is false. No company in the history of humanity has spent money to tell their customers how to do less business with them. They are paying you to call me and you expect me to believe that they are paying you money so they can get less money from me in the future? Makes no sense.
When I worked for ATT, I saw a customer with a legacy unlimited data account. This was after they brought back unlimited data after years of overcharging people for data "overages".
I absolutely could not convince this person to change to the new plan that was a third of the price.
They probably had true unlimited, not the 10gb then throttling "unlimited" that's offered now. AT&T has like 3 different levels of unlimited plan...
"Unlimited doesn't mean unlimited. Unlimited has limits. As a matter of fact, there are unlimited limits!" - Telecoms
I had a call last week where T Mobile SWORE to me up and down that I ran out of data on my 5 GB of LTE, then unlimited 3G speed plan. Which went down like this:
“right, and I’m out of LTE speed data, that’s fine, but you’ve throttled me to UNDER 10 Kbps, that’s emphatically not 3G speeds, I can’t even complete a speedtest”
“Sir it’s showing me that you’re out of data”
“Out of LTE data, but I still have unlimited 3G, thats the plan I bought”
“Sir you’ve hit the limit on your unlimited plan”
“If you are ceasing usable service at a certain limit, what part of this plan is unlimited?”
“Your data is unlimited sir, but you’ve hit your data limit for the month”
This kinda shit is straight up fraud, and clearly designed to con people who don’t know any better out of their money. I read the fine print, all of it, and their full corporate policy. I’m also technical, and I can see I have an RSSI to the tower of higher than -40, my signal is great. They advertised, and I paid for far more. That’s beside the fact that “unlimited” data literally doesn’t exist, there is a line speed to every uplink, you can’t physically download more than that a month. The government needs to get off their ass and prosecute these motherfuckers.
lol we don't even have 3G here anymore and 5G is at least an hour away. It's LTE or nothing.
T-Mobile shit down their 3g network in 2022. It sucks too because the speeds and coverage from 3g are much better than LTE or 5g.
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverage/t-mobile-network-evolution
To be fair, I would likely behave just like that customer out of pure fear of losing a plan I like and never being able to get it back because it's deprecated.
My previous ISP once called me to tell me that i couldn't reach the speed of my current plan from my house, and offered me to take a cheaper package without reducing my speed.
My current ISP sent me a mail at the beginning of this year informing me they were quadrupling my speed at no extra charge. And they did, I went from 50 up/down to 200.
What ISP do you have? Is it a local ISP?
My ISP lowered their (already very competitive) prices for no good reason, so some do exist
The reason is retention. For a company that sells a service where they pay a single overhead (like maintaining a structure) it always makes more sense to lose a little money and retain a customer if prices are going down elsewhere.
That is to say if your internet plan is $80 and they have intel that a local competitor has started selling a similar plan for $60, it makes more sense to spend 3 minutes talking to an existing customer about lowering their bill to $60 rather than let that customer discover a cheaper plan and switch to someone else. If they let that customer switch they lose the whole $80 whereas if they just lower that customer's price they only lose $20.
They are the sole owner of the fiber around here, you aren't getting faster more stable internet for that price, no way.
I was paying about around $30 for gigabit, which is awesome here in the Czech republic. They dropped the price by $5 to $25.
I understand why companies would do it usually, but here, I honestly don't see why they would. They're offering great service for great prices
T-Mobile has lowered my prices while increasing my service in the past. The fact that they don't dick me around is one of the reasons I've stayed. If they're going to start this shit, then I'm going to leave.
And go where
My ISP has called me and offered me cheaper internet more then once for the same speed I was on. And one time it was faster and cheaper.
There is a plausible economic incentive to do this:
Reputation.
This happens less in markets with few, big sellers and lots of customers locked into long-term contracts (like ISPs), but it does happen occasionally in high competition markets where customers can take their business elsewhere easily.
Restaurants are a good example - where I live, a host might hand out a round of after-meal shots on the house to encourage a big table of uncomplicated guests to come again.
That's not entirely true. I recall a consulting client who had a customer program where redeemable points didn't expire.
The thing was, this meant that inactive accounts with just a handful of points ended up costing a ton in accounting upkeep because they had to account for the possibility these years old accounts might suddenly redeem points.
So they rolled out a new program that was legit much better for the vast majority of active accounts to migrate people over.
Yes, it was still them doing something that was to save them money, but the new alternative was also better for the customer too. It was simply closing a loophole they'd not thought about when first designing it which didn't benefit the customers, it simply led to procedural costs that skyrocketed.
So there are rarely cases where companies will spend money to do something in your interests. It's just always going to also be in their own interests too.
I’ve actually had Verizon call me to offer a lower rate for faster home internet. I presume it extended my contract and somehow got the sales person a bonus but it still cost me $15 less per month.
Over the years, Verizon has increased my speed twice without additional charges. But not for the same price I was paying in the first story.
Yes, the good old "the more you spend, the more you save!"
AKA you spend more but you get some much more value that actually you're saving (no you're not).
You can tell that this is just a cash grab, as opposed to a technical or administrative motivation, by the mere fact that Simple/Select Choice plans will be migrated to Magenta, while Magenta plans will be migrated to Go5G. So Magenta isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future.
Also, of course, by the fact that you can opt out of the "upgrade."
I switched to T-Mobile a few years ago and, coming from AT&T, it had been hands-down a positive experience. More features, unlimited data, better customer service, better speeds, all for less than what I was paying AT&T. I even have a line or two that was added for free, no strings attached.
But then there were the many data breaches and the announcement they would add a surcharge for credit card payment. And now this.
Looks like I came on board just in time to witness the enshitification
To be honest, I'm surprised they kept the 'uncarrier' image for so long. This was bound to happen, especially after the sprint merger was approved. I really feel T-Mobile pushed the big two to make changes to compete and now all I fear all three will go back to the old ways.
What makes you so cynical as to assume with less competition oligopolies have more power? /s
Just like Microsoft's announcement of the closure of the Activision deal trumpeting "more choice" for gamers. Literally just took away a competitor! Kroger's purchase of Albertsons when we've all been dying in the US from grocery price gouging for the last 4 years.
Fuck the legislators, SEC and the courts for letting companies continuously destroy competition while mostly giving up things they wanted to anyway.
They were awesome, but as it common at these compnaies when the CEO driving a lot of these changes left, they brought in some grey-hair bean counter who has been slowly rolling shitty-change onto shitty change. I really loved them when I switched form Verizon around ~2015 but I'm now starting to look at other optoins. Google Fi is currently the top of my list but we'll see.
Why do you not have laws against this kind of shit? There's no way a company can do that to you here without explicit permission.
So dumb, they claim they are moving you to a new plan with more features. Here are the “features” of the new plan ONE Plus to Go5g:
*$5 more per line x 5 lines = $25 more each month
*Lose Kickback which I use on 2 lines = $20 more each month
*10GB Hotspot instead of 5GB in Canada/Mexico, something I’ve used once since I’ve been on T-Mobile
*720p HD streaming video, down from my 4K unlimited streaming passes
Fortunately, I was easily able to opt out thanks to the heads up from these posts.
Here's a guide on how to opt out of the price increases
Literally pissing on the customer and telling them it's raining.
LiterallyFiguratively pissing on the customer and telling them it's raining.FTFY
No, they came to my house, lured me outside, and a T-Mobile representative pissed on me from my roof as I walked out.
My bad then.
Nah I'm good. My general stance on people that correct that kind of language usage is that they are deeply uninteresting people that don't need to participate in discussions
Got to love a good bit of a corporate gaslighting
It's called rent seeking. Just capitalism working as intended.
I genuinely don't understand why so many people go with the network brand. AFAIK all of the US networks have MVNO's that operate on their networks at much lower cost. Some of those virtual operators are even owned by the big guys, e.g. Cricket on ATT. My coworkers pay literally hundreds of dollars more per month than is necessary, and what, they get a few Mbps faster data rates? Is that really worth it?
Edit: TIL a lot of people have had a hard time with MVNO's. My experience has been excellent and consistent, but that apparently doesn't generalize.
In more populated areas it makes sense since Brand customers have prioritized traffic over MVNOs. So if you want any service at all, then…
I have both T-Mobile and Visible on my phone and I've had to switch to Visible in more congested areas because T-Mobile will crawl.
I've never had any issues with the Tmobile prepaid plan in either NYC nor north NJ, although I'm not sure if the prepaid plans have the same lowered priority as Mint, for example.
I have used StraightTalk a couple years ago with the T-Mobile SIM. In the countryside, I could barely do anything, whereas my friend on prepaid T-Mobile worked "as normal" as you'd expect. So their MVNO priorities are a bit of a gamble.
In SoCal it can get pretty bad, and I've been to Disneyland and other events (concerts/sports) where the phone simply doesn't work at all. I'm on a Verizon MVNO right now that seems to be fine, but the AT&T and T-Mobile based ones both have issues around here.
Right I'm saying does the prepaid T-Mobile plan count as an MVNO? If it's directly from them vs a separate company like Mint
No, it isn't an MVNO, but I do think it gets lower priority than their premium plans.
This is correct, as many people have pointed out though, this is an urban issue. Priority data doesn't really play into the world of rural users who don't have enough people in town to congest their single tower
I didn't have any issues with Metro when I lived in San Diego and Apple Valley back in 2015 through early 2016.
Because those are way lower down the priority list when it comes to network congestion. If you are in a populated area your service will suffer.
T-Mobile bought Mint. Verizon bought Tracphone, which owns Straight Talk. There aren't many independent MVNOs left. And the ones that are are being deprioritized to the point where the service basically doesn't work when the tower is busy.
I hope this doesn't translate to a higher cost for Google Fi in the future.
Problem with MVNOs is that they get swallowed up or go defunct. I don't need my data transferring hands nor do I want to deal with switching cellphone plans. I just need it to work.
They also have terrible options for international data.
I've stuck with T-Mobile largely for the international data (plus the grandfathered plan I have) but unless you travel intentionally every month it's likely cheaper to just get an in-country eSIM plan to cover you for traveling.
do you have a consistent source for these eSIMs? The thing that's always held me back was that it was just another thing I have to worry about while traveling.
Holafly is decent.
This is what I did when I visited the UK a few years ago. I paid about $30 and I was covered for the entire trip.
My experience is similar to yours.
I've had Metro for years...
Before they existed there was a time when I had service directly through T-Mobile and before they became T-Mobile, Voicestream.
Metro is great... Super affordable and works as well as full fledged T-Mobile for me.
I think part of it for a lot of people is that MVNOs typically don't offer financing on phones and they don't always have the flagships available.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
T-Mobile is moving people to newer, more expensive plans starting with the November bill cycle unless customers call the company to opt out, according to multiple reports.
The forced migration surfaced on Reddit two days ago and was confirmed by The Mobile Report, which published portions of leaked documents indicating how the plan changes will be implemented.
T-Mobile also confirmed the change to CNET, telling the news site that "there will be an increase of approximately $10 per line with the migration."
T-Mobile's current plans range from $60 to $100 a month for a single line or $5 more if you don't enroll in the AutoPay discount.
T-Mobile recently started requiring a debit card or linked bank account to get the AutoPay discount, which may be concerning to users because of the company's history of data breaches and leaks.
T-Mobile was once a smaller wireless company fighting behemoths AT&T and Verizon but is now one of three major national carriers after acquiring Sprint in 2020.
The original article contains 838 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I seriously don't understand why it's legal for companies to just, tell you that you need to pay more for things. Aren't cellphone plans a contract? How can one party change a contract without the consent of the other party?
If you are signing a contract authored exclusively by one party you can assume it is designed solely to expand and protect the rights of that one party to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. This can include their rights to modify the terms (usually with some form of notice).
Anything less would be a failing on the part of their attorneys. As a consumer you can agree to their terms or.. take your business to a competitor who will offer similar terms.
If you want some specifics, here they are (emphasis mine):
Probably sneaked in during renewals.
There was a minute where TMo was the good guy in wireless.
Now, for me at least, Xfinity is the one to have.
T-Mobile is still awesome. My 5G plan is $70 a month for phone and Apple Watch and I got a free year of MLB and MLS and a bunch of other stuff.
That’s not to defend this bullshit “opt-out” move but at this point it’s still a rumor and hasn’t happened yet. We’ll see how they play it out.
Fair enough.
It’s just that I pay $30/month per unlimited line that include UWB with Xfinity mobile, which runs on Verizon’s network.
I remember they had a plan for around $55 where they promised no price increases ever. So instead what they do is create a "new" plan periodically. I went up to "magenta Max" because I wanted some of the features and now they're doing "Go 5G". They try to advertise "upgrade every year" but they've BEEN doing that since the "jump" program when I first signed up for them years ago.
Basically they create a new plan with minor changes to the specific details and claim it's not a price change. They hadn't been automatically changing people until this though.
I’ve been on Simple Choice for many, many years now. I get up to 14 lines @ $50/line, each one has unlimited data & talk, plus 50 GB/month tethering. (There are other options included but I don’t use them.
Apparently, last time I looked, Magenta is more expensive, had no extra lines, and tethering is an added cost. Plus those extra features are mostly an added cost as well.
I really hope that we can indeed “opt out” of being forcibly moved to a different plan!
Rent seeking bullshit.
I'm still on a no longer available plan with unlimited everything in can and us for less than what my friends are paying for literally nothing. I don't have voicemail because I hate it and adding it would force me onto a shittier plan anyways last I checked.
Our bill went from 80 to 110. We are looking at the bigger networks....and it looks like it's significantly less than what we are paying.
I’m paying $190 For 9 lines. I’ll be opting out if they try to swap me, at an additional $10 per line it’d be cheaper to do prepaid on Verizon through us mobile or visible. The other postpaid carriers prices are too high compared even to the more expensive plan T-Mobile would swap me to because my T-Mobile plan includes taxes and fees.
If you're happy with coverage, check out Google Fi. Unlimited for $20 a line (for 4+ lines).
Up to 6. My family of 7 had to split into two different accounts to get us all on Fi. Still, 7 people for $160 (80+80) isn't too bad, and way better than the $300+ I was paying on Verizon.
110 for what? And who has anything cheaper?
2 lines. Att has the same for 75 and that's just att.
A follow up. Is that before or after taxes and fees? I’m paying 117 all up to att for two lines with a grandfathered plan and would like to pay less.
Remember that T-mobile gives a bottom line prices, while AT&T and Verizon add a bunch of junk fees. Be sure to check into that before you switch.
They aren't raising the price, they are just charging you more money. Your plan is being removed, so they can put you on a different plan that costs more. And, at least in my case, is actually inferior to my current plan. Fucking assholes are actually making me consider AT&T which I swore I'd never do.
I saw what they did to my family members and immediately complained. They let me keep my old prepaid contract, which lets me use 1 MiB of data per day for free at no monthly cost due to what I assume is a billing system oversight. It works well with Opera Mini on a feature phone, the battery also lasts a week because I mostly use my smartphone for entertainment. The new contract would bill me $0.50 for every day I went online (capped at 150 MiB).
I don't really have a choice, all providers in this country are greedy AF
How could you keep data use below 1 MiB? That's a significantly small amount of data in the modern era of anything Internet connected.
Were you mostly on wifi? You said you used your mobile primarily for entertainment, that usually takes data.
I believe you I'm just drawing a blank at how you were using your phone and its data plan!
Two phones:
Awesome, thanks for the details. Bummer that your plan changed you really had it worked out :(
It didn't. I complained on time and they let me keep my plan.
The prepaid plan has the following daily cost of data:
1st MiB free (oversight?)
pay CZK 0.25 ($0.01) per every 256 kiB after that
once you pay CZK 10 ($0.40) for 10 MiB, the next 90 MiB is free for the day
This is obviously a godsend to feature phone users, and every early mobile internet adopter would have taken this plan in 2003 when WAP websites were usually no more than 4 kB. A 1¢ or 2¢ overpayment if you somehow manage to go over is not too much, either.
The new plan:
They touted it as an upgrade (150 MB/12 CZK is a better rate than 100/10) but it obviously isn’t, as many users will use less than the first MiB. But as opposed to in-your-face ads they ran for the original plan, this one was only mentioned in their monthly bulletin nobody subscribes to. To quote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
There was no “we'll upgrade your plan unless you opt out” prompt – people just started getting switched. I was lucky that my grandpa alerted me about his plan getting changed before mine was. I called the hotline and opted out just in time. The plan shows up as `` in my billing app but it still functions as normal. No new customers are admitted to the plan now so I really feel I dodged a bullet.
The service providers here cater to complaints so that they don't escalate into an anti-trust lawsuit that could break up their cartel. They will bill you obscenely but keep you “happy” with cheap gift giveaways, good customer service and excellent coverage. There is no option on the market for cheap data even if you're willing to give up some speed, reliability, free sunglasses or smiling customer reps.
Damn you have this planned out down to the kibibytes. I am impressed!
Looking forward to seeing how this plays out. I’m on the Magenta plan. It’s already more than enough for my needs so it’ll be interesting to see what they have to offer and how they receive my opt-out.
This is bonkers. Why not just send a notification about new pricing plans and allow customers to opt-in? That’s rhetorical.
What made you choose Telekom over Vodafone?
They better not fuck with my plan. It's bad enough I had to get the boot from Sprint.
Make sure you call and opt out if you notice anything funny on your bill or account page.
I had what was their "top tier" Magenta Max plan.
Now with the newer plans they made, if I want to do a phone trade in or upgrade I don't get as good of a deal on Magenta Max. I only get the better deals if I'm on one of their new and even more expensive plans.
So right now they aren't (yet) forcing a price increase or making me switch plans, but they did make any future phones obtained through them more expensive for me to get.
My wife and I were planning on switching this weekend from AT&T after nearly 20y but that's not gonna happen.
Switch to their prepaid plans! My wife and I pay $15 each for 3.5GB each, and if one/both of you uses TikTok/Reels then the 6.5GB plan is $10 more. For us, can't ever beat $30 and we get foreign SIMs when we travel.
Meanwhile in France I get 100GB at 5G speed and unlimited calls for the equivalent of $20. Mobile plans are expensive as fuck in North America 😅
That's what we are thinking only concern we have is our neighbor who uses I think cricket who's the prepaid AT&T equivalent says he isn't having good luck with it. I'm not sure what would cause that and I'd hate to support some like T mobile by using a brand that contract through them. Verizon and US cellular are not options for our area due to service not being good.