You have to hand it Legere. He's bold. Provocative. And speaks his mind. In the best interests of the company of course, but with a direct emphasis on making customers happy.
What's important to note is that T-Mobile is quickly becoming a company that delivers a great product and is customer-centric. And when the incumbents start playing catch up (AT&T in particular) you know they're making the right moves.
I've been with Verizon for a few years and I can't say their service is what it's marketed to be. Data is fast but the inability to simultaneously do data and voice is just idiotic. The monthly fees are also totally insane. I pay $140 / month for a single data line (iPhone). In contrast to Verizon, with T-Mobile you get unlimited voice and data for a little over $70, no contract and stellar customer service. I called T-Mobile to switch last month and with a little negotiating, they sent me a _free_ iPhone 5S. No contract. No bullshit.
T-Mobile's latest announcement of up to $650 in credits for switching over will increase their subscriber base by millions of new users, no question. It's bold, aggressive and customer-centric.
I can't personally speak on AT&T's network but we all know it's one of the worst companies in the world to deal with. Their service is spotty for many, many users. Their customer service is non-existent. Their data practices are borderline unethical (with hidden data caps, throttling, etc). AT&T is just an awful company. I'm stuck with their uVerse Internet service and it's just a disaster. Unfortunately, many of us have no other choice but their lousy broadband product. Let's not even talk about Time Warner.
T-Mobile's coverage, from what I have experienced, is stellar. Up and down the California coast. Mexico. Europe. NYC. Seattle. I'm always at 4+ bars. Data is fast (~18Mbps downstream). International roaming is perhaps one of the most impressive features of TMO. I remember paying $20 / MB with Verizon and that's just absolutely criminal. And they can get away with it because many customers aren't even aware of this until they get the bill.
Legere is right - the mobile landscape is just horrendous and it's mainly because of AT&T and Verizon. I hope T-Mobile continues this push towards making customers happy and simply offering better products. Their bottom line will be the ultimate proof of how this is working out for them - and from what I'm seeing, their new subscriber numbers are growing exponentially. You could say they're disrupting the industry. And that's rare from these monoliths.
>What's important to note is that T-Mobile is quickly becoming a company that delivers a great product and is customer-centric.
For those of us who have been with T-Mobile for years now, the company has always been this way, just more-so now. Glad the secret's finally getting out, and kudos to Legere for making it happen.
I've been with them since 2006 and I've generally been happy. The only problem is their coverage in rural areas is spotty, and I like being in rural areas as much as possible.
T-mo's coverage in California at least is noticeably worse than Verizon's. In SF its absolutely slower, and elsewhere it is non-existent where Verizon has LTE.
I'm overall quite happy though. I switched from paying Verizon $100/mo to $30/month with T-Mobile ($250 etf paid for itself in 4 months). Its also worth mentioning that since I moved over my CDMA iPhone 5, I am using HSPDA+ (on 1900mhz where it exists) not LTE
I use T-Mobile and am quite happy with it; I pay $30 a month for basically everything I need and no contract.
It is worth noting, however, that T-Mobile has some serious problems. There are large swaths of this country where T-Mobile simply doesn't have service. For instance, last time I drove from Denver to Chicago I lost reception 1 hour into the trip and got it back a few hours before I arrived. There was perhaps one town where I had service during the drive. I thought that this couldn't possibly be right, but I stopped by a T-Mobile store and confirmed that this is the case. I thought that mobile providers worked to ensure that your phone would work at least when you are on an interstate, but not with T-Mobile.
Also, unlimited Internet doesn't really mean unlimited Internet in practice. They throttle so heavily after I hit my 5 GB cap that they might as well have cut off the data plan. Programs stopped working as the requests would time out and the app would assume I had no connectivity.
I use/abuse my T-Mobile plan at times and at others barely use it at all. It all averages out to a pretty light to moderate usage, I figure. One of the reasons I really like T-Mobile is that they have never really bothered me about it.
The worst instance of abuse was once, for a couple months, I used tethering as my only home Internet access as my land lady was dragging her feet on getting Internet access installed. During one of those months I decided to watch the first few seasons of The Mentalist and that uses data plenty quick. An hour of video is still several hundred MB even with these fancy new encodings.
Their current deal is $50 for an "unlimited" plan that switches to EDGE after 500MB and $60 for a similar plan with a 2 GB limit (or 3 GB, can't remember which).
Yes, the unlimited data plan is the horseshit, despite what that playboy is telling me.
After getting throttled on day 3 of the month with my new phone, I'm down to approx 70 kbits/s. I can't even watch youtube without a 50% duty cycle.
and T-Mobile is far from sucky. I've had them for ~10 years and had numerous problems with various aspects of their company.
When I bought my last phone through them, their website failed to let me transfer my old phone number to it. Instead, it started a new account for me. Three calls to customer service and it's not resolved.
The first call the operator couldn't figure out what was going on. The second, the network quality to Asia was so bad, there was no communication possible. The third, I was hung up on while I was transferred.
Last time I filled up my monthly card, their web page said the fill up failed, so I tried again and it failed again. Next thing I knew, the charges had gone through twice.
The year before that I signed up for a data plan, but it wasn't compatible with my phone and they wouldn't cancel that plan - until I used a lawyer.
There have been many bumps in the road prior to that, too. I only use them because they have the right balance of coverage for the price. That is to say, second best coverage in my area and second highest monthly price.
There still are a lot of bumps. Their billing systems remain a mess, especially trying to use it on an iPad (if I don't disable wi-fi, it asks me for the iPad's phone number). I really wanted to use T-Mobile to support their free 200mb offer, but it's a mess to sign-up for extra data.
My final reason for leaving -- even though they suffered many high profile password hacks in the past, they still store them as clear-text and email it to you when doing a password reset.
That stinks. I had my old number changed over and active service in < 1 hour. Their service is actually really good here in atlanta other than in parking garages, and strangely, in my own domicile. I get phone reception, but no data. I have high speed internet and wifi at home though, obviously, so it doesn't matter.
My personal experience with their throttled data is that it is perfectly sufficient for emails, WhatsApp, and even low bandwidth radio and audio podcast streaming. It even works for moderate internet browsing in a pinch, although if you need more additional high speed data is still quite cheap ($10 for 2gb and $20 for unlimited).
None of the ones labelled "unlimited" look like "5GB cap", they look like unlimited on the phone + limited amount of tethered usage. It would seem to make very little sense to offer 5GB + 2.5GB for the same price as a combined total 4.5GB.
This is an off-contract pre-paid plan. I believe that you must buy these as SIM kits from Walmart. When I got it, you had to buy it from a physical store, but it looks like you can do it online now though it may take some time for your SIM card to arrive.
Word to the wise, you get basically no T-Mobile customer service once you switch to pre-paid. I have been on contract with them before and they are very helpful, but on pre-paid it seems like you are on your own.
It's not absolutely slower in SF than Verizon. It's absolutely faster. I switched from 3-5 mbps Verizon service to 30 mbps T-Mobile service. Sounds like an iPhone problem to me.
I'm not sure if you can make a reasonable comparison of speed if your device doesn't support LTE...
Also, California is a pretty big state. In LA, we use a lot of different data devices in the office from Verizon (mostly the Pantech ULM290s), AT&T, and T-Mobile (we dropped Sprint a couple years ago - they were terrible). T-Mobile performs great down here. I haven't had problems w/ my T-Mobile LTE devices (I carry an unlocked 5S, Nexus 4, and iPad Mini) when I'm up north either.
This. I've been on holiday in la and sf and using tmobile 4g on my iPhone. It's a joke and I'm from New Zealand and on a carrier that is only 3G. The coverage drops all the time and speeds were awful, also super expensive ($60 for 2.5 gigs and some arbitrary amount of minutes/texts).
Nope. In the scandinavian countries you get decent service even in remote areas. And remote in Finland or Sweden means about as remote as you can get .
I heared that in Sweden, if you drive far enough to the north, there will just be a network called "Sweden" and you can connect to that, no matter what your provider is.
Yeah, with America's biggest cities having people sometimes whole metres apart, it's no wonder you can't have good internet. Here in Europe, cities are so jam-packed full of people, whenever I need to pee, I have to use an extender hose just to reach the urinal! And then to flush, you call the person next to your urinal and hold a videocall over your unlimited data connection.
The plan to pay for ETFs to switch from other carriers does not seem to make much financial sense. For a monthly plan of $50, it would take T-Mobile many years to break even on this initial cost and it is not clear if they will be guaranteed to retain the subscriber for that time. Unless they again charge the equivalent of an ETF on their contract, something seems off here.
What's important to note is that T-Mobile is quickly becoming a company that delivers a great product and is customer-centric. And when the incumbents start playing catch up (AT&T in particular) you know they're making the right moves.
I've been with Verizon for a few years and I can't say their service is what it's marketed to be. Data is fast but the inability to simultaneously do data and voice is just idiotic. The monthly fees are also totally insane. I pay $140 / month for a single data line (iPhone). In contrast to Verizon, with T-Mobile you get unlimited voice and data for a little over $70, no contract and stellar customer service. I called T-Mobile to switch last month and with a little negotiating, they sent me a _free_ iPhone 5S. No contract. No bullshit.
T-Mobile's latest announcement of up to $650 in credits for switching over will increase their subscriber base by millions of new users, no question. It's bold, aggressive and customer-centric.
I can't personally speak on AT&T's network but we all know it's one of the worst companies in the world to deal with. Their service is spotty for many, many users. Their customer service is non-existent. Their data practices are borderline unethical (with hidden data caps, throttling, etc). AT&T is just an awful company. I'm stuck with their uVerse Internet service and it's just a disaster. Unfortunately, many of us have no other choice but their lousy broadband product. Let's not even talk about Time Warner.
T-Mobile's coverage, from what I have experienced, is stellar. Up and down the California coast. Mexico. Europe. NYC. Seattle. I'm always at 4+ bars. Data is fast (~18Mbps downstream). International roaming is perhaps one of the most impressive features of TMO. I remember paying $20 / MB with Verizon and that's just absolutely criminal. And they can get away with it because many customers aren't even aware of this until they get the bill.
Legere is right - the mobile landscape is just horrendous and it's mainly because of AT&T and Verizon. I hope T-Mobile continues this push towards making customers happy and simply offering better products. Their bottom line will be the ultimate proof of how this is working out for them - and from what I'm seeing, their new subscriber numbers are growing exponentially. You could say they're disrupting the industry. And that's rare from these monoliths.