T-Mobile Rocks(avc.com) Great points from Fred Wilson. And accordingly to Pogue's NYT article, they signed up more new subs in the last quarter than the big 3 combined. But, in light of their service map and much more limited travel, curious if it's enough to make you switch? Trying to figure this out myself... |
I am curious to try out the Walmart plan (refer comments) next time and cut my costs by half.
T-Mobile's network is worse. Really, it's worse. I'm considering going back to AT&T despite all the crap because I'm sick of picking up my phone and seeing "no coverage available" in places where I had five bars yesterday.
Is that a plug and play solution or does the author have to do manual fine tuning? In both cases it is amazing how far we are with text-to-speech compared to only a few years ago.
Here on the Western slope they have the worst service of the big four. Here, only people shopping strictly on price choose T-Mobile. They want your business, they just don't want to spend any money on the infrastructure to make it even marginally acceptable.
Who knows about what country I'm talking about though...
Apple completely smashed that. Carriers now, for the most part, accept that they don't get to decide what your phone does, only how you use your connection with them. The carriers used to do things like disable Bluetooth and charge you extra to turn it back on, or force all apps to go through their own internal approval process and purchasing.
I'm not terribly happy with the status quo Apple has left us with. Rather than place control with us where it belongs, they've just moved control to Apple. Apple is a far better overlord to have than the carriers, but it's still not great. However, we should still recognize that Apple pulled off a massive change that nobody really thought could be done.
My comment was more about the leverage it had over the carriers and completely squandered. IIRC, AT&T was paying Apple $10 or so per user per month. A carrier paying a handset manufacturer a fee seems like a lot of leverage. At this point, Apple had the potential to turn the industry away from fleecing customers. Instead, in 2013, we're lauding an upstart-ish company for contract-free smartphones. Great progress, but its taken far far too long.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/10/business/la-fi-tn-if...
Still, I'm glad that the invention carrier-approved and net-locked phones never/rarely made it across the ocean.
Too bad they turned down the iPhone when it was offered to them.
http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/
- Verizon: 40.11%
- T-Mobile: 1.57%
Here is a quote from their fine print
> Not for extended international use; you must reside in the U.S. and primary usage must occur on our U.S. network. Device must register on our U.S. network before international use. Service may be terminated or restricted for excessive roaming or misuse.
The only bad thing I would say with Virgin Mobile is about the roaming, but if you are sure you say in Sprints coverage area (in the US) then you probably won't have a problem. Other than that, I'll still recommend people look at Virgin when they are looking for new plans.
No, if all people move to T-Mobile, they will just start behaving like the other carriers. The only reasons they're customer friendly is because they have a low market share and try to win customers, not because it's their company culture. Just look at their German parent company, Deutsche Telekom is the German AT&T.
If enough people switch - the others will have to make some changes in order to stay competitive. He's not suggesting that we all pledge loyalty to t-mobile until the end of time.
As far as I am concerned that is worthy of loyalty, and I intend to remain with them unless they change their behaviour - even if not the absolute cheapest.
Bizarre that them doing what they said they would should surprise me and engender loyalty ofc, but it did. Just my 2 cents.
There is certainly nothing smart about paying seventy, eighty, or more, per month for a smart phone. If anyone is smart its the guys charging for it and getting it.
The usa was 5 years behind the eu in forcing contracts, so yes this is just another marketing gimmick. classic bait & switch tactic. all of the carriers forced contracts after they bought out the regional mobile providers during the decade 1995-2005.
And I agree, Deutsche Telekom in Germany is awful and incompetent when it comes to customer service. If only their network weren’t so goddamn great … (It feels like a reversal of the situation in the US: Their technology is great and they are very competent at building their infrastructure – but how they treat customers is the exact opposite of that. And when I say technology I mean the network, not the technology they use to interface with customers. Stupid story time: Recently, after changing some notification SMS setting online, I got an e-mail thanking me for my change in contract and telling me that my monthly fee is €50, not the €50 minus €10 online ordering discount I knew I got when I entered into the contract. When calling their support hotline I was told that their system is apparently unable to display individual discounts on any and all communication with the customer except the monthly bill. The support agent also told me that I wasn’t the first person to call him because of that …)
Amusingly, you just described VZW in the United States. Fantastic network, absolutely awful at dealing with their customers.
In Croatia, T-Mobile is absolutely the worst carrier. Highest fees, worst customer support. They can get away with it because they have the most customers and it's just too much of a hassle to change providers.
At least that's how it was around 3 years ago. I don't live there anymore so maybe something changed (I doubt it).
It is interesting how even huge corporations like Telekom adjust their marketing and overall strategy depending on their market position. I like how they handle their role as an underdog in the US, but I'm not under any illusions. This isn't a grand gesture of goodwill, but a necessary evil in their eyes, I guess.
T-Mobile had a sudden change of heart not because they give a shit about their customers, its because their network wasn't good enough for people to put up with typical carrier bullshit. As a normal carrier, they were losing money and customers so fast that they had to either change or go out of business.
I highly doubt they would have made the same philosophical changes if they had been successful doing things the scummy way.
Unfortunately, I can't tolerate the service the network itself provides anymore. It used to be fairly functional inside city limits here (Chicago), but now it works poorly downtown, often shows max signal on HSPA+ but doesn't actually have a data connection, and if I leave city limits to go for a drive, I'm looking at probably 20 minutes outside the city before I'm on a non-data or roaming connection.
I just started a new job that provides smartphone service, so I'll probably move my t-mobile account to a minimum amount per month and get a little nokia flip phone for when I'm not doing work related things. - Another big plus for t-mobile is they'll be happy to change my monthly plan without some badgering renewal bit, I've done it twice and they always accommodate me.
I used to use AT&T GoPhone for this, until they sold me a "special deal for SXSW" in Austin that would keep my number and data working for multiple trips three years for $100. A few months later they cancelled the data portion of the plan (naturally refusing to refund my $100 since voice still works) and made it impossible to get pay-as-you-go data on an iPhone no matter how much money you give them.
They might have fixed that now, but they've lost me to T-Mobile.
The biggest thing with them this year was their 384kbps Speed Throttle[1], where after your family consumed 75GB of data (download and upload) the speed of your DSL (flatrate) will go down to 384kbps for the rest of the month.
Ok you could say "this is Deutsche Telekom, the parent company, but T-Mobile is very different!" but sorry, that is not the case.
I wanted to buy a Alcatel One Touch Fire with Firefox OS when I was on holidays in Poland this year so I went to a T-Mobile store and well, there was advertising and everything and they even sold them there. But only together with a contract, which I didn't want (because I can't use it in Sweden where I live). They send me to another store so I went there, they told me the same and send me to a third store where they told me that they only sell a couple of them without a contract and only in the main cities.
I mean wtf? They have been doing advertisement all over the place that they sell it for 404 zl without a contract, even in those shops, but they wouldn't sell them to me, or they would but only with a two years contract which ended up costing around 1200 zl. So I gave up.
At home again I checked their website[2] again, and yep, there they still (and to this day) advertise it for 404 zl.
I later found out that if you have a polish ID you can order one for 404 zl from their website which I did with help of my fathers ID.
So they were just fucking with me, again, and yeah, this was not the first time. I had big time problems back then when I still lived in Germany and chose a different DSL provider after being very disappointed with T-Online. Basically they didn't send a technician for two months who would fix the tech so the new provider could provide me with internet so I was without internet for two months. That is kind of a big thing if you're working from home.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/technology/deutsche-teleko... [2] http://www.t-mobile.pl/pl/indywidualni/telefony/telefon-ze-s...
5GB of 4g internet with 3g speeds after that, unlimited texting, and 100 minutes of non-wifi talk (unlimited on wifi) per month is only $30 flat on T-Mobile if you buy the start-up kit at Walmart.
If you need more minutes than that you can either call over wifi, pay $0.10/minute or talk all you want for free over Wifi/3g/4g using a VoIP app like GrooveIP.
Is this accurate? http://support.t-mobile.com/thread/52768?start=0&tstart=0
But the coverage is truly more limited.
The results? well the plans were just as expensive as those from AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, except that Tmobile had by far the worst coverage of all, I didn't get any signal inside my office.
The plan mobility was crap as well, with some plans you were stuck and couldn't move, they wanted me to buy a new SIMcard to change plans and I had to get the new one from one of their stores in particular else it wouldn't work. Why do that if not to keep me locked in a crap plan?
They said it was the end of carrier trickery but they forced me get a ridiculously expensive plan in order to be able to pay for an additional international calling service, meaning that I had to pay for a bunch of crap I did not need just to be able to qualify for that small extra feature.
Overall my experience was pretty bad and Tmob's new strategy can be summed as much ado about nothing with a lot of fine print in the middle.
I finally switched to Att about 2 years ago and I have to admit: every time I called, everyone was friendly and helpful. Nothing was hidden: they laid out their charges and I agreed to them. They may have even slightly higher ($10 a month), but I have excellent nationwide coverage and very good internet speeds when I need it.
This was just my experience, and it may be different for others.
Even last year, when they somehow lost my old messaging plan in a phone upgrade, the rep (who I didn't even have to wait long to speak with) quickly switched me back.
The moment they require me to switch to a Mobile Share plan I'm out, but until then I'm continually surprised to be such a happy customer.
Best cell phone service for the price IMO is http://www.pagepluscellular.com/ (a verizon reseller). $55 / month (including taxes and fees) for unlimited calling, unlimited texts, and 2 gigs of data. I have been a customer of theirs for a year and a half. Their customer service is pretty good, but more importantly their signal strength (coming from verizon's towers) is the best out of all the carriers in NYC.
The one big caveat with the MVNO resellers is that they don't offer LTE data and some don't support LTE phones (ie iphone 5, 5c, 5s, etc).
TL;DR - if you're down to use an iPhone 4S or other 3G smartphone you can save some serious money per month going through an MVNO reseller.
I was told by a rep in Seattle that "new towers have just gone in for NYC", though YMMV.
In my apartment in the Upper West Side, I was getting a 3G data on an unlocked AT&T iphone 4S with a t-mobile sim, but only 2 bars of voice service. I'm tempted to try t-mobile's $30 / month 5Gig data + 100 minutes plan to use with my iphone 5s.
If their LTE service has decent coverage I may be able to get away with using facetime audio + google voice + talkatone.
Has anyone done this in NYC?
That's a big caveat that should be mentioned.
(If you never leave the Bay Area, for example, then T-Mobile is a logical choice. It works well for me 98% of the time here.)
http://thetechblock.com/get-unlimited-talk-text-data-30-ipho...
Also, I must say that telcos, and even banks, in India are to an extent like this. Had one bank put a 1.5$ on my credit card statement for an analysis that they did on my spend the previous month - which indicated that 100% of my card spend was towards airfare. I used the card only once, EVER, and I did not ask for that analysis! I ended up spending 3$ (counting just travel cost) fighting the 1.5$ charge, but I absolutely wasn't going to let them have it!
Imagine telcos making an extra 1$ on some random charge on some 10 million customers. Even that is a lot of money!
A customer, not an employee. I won't gush, see ting.com, it's an MVNO on the Sprint network.
EDIT: It kind of bothers me that someone downvoted this. It's not like I used an affiliate link or stand to benefit from this. Sorry for sharing :P
I would be remiss not to give them a huge amount of credit for their support staff. They really care about that. The only time I called in, a live person answered the phone after 1 or 2 rings and then proceeded to solve a somewhat technical problem without transferring me.
Anyway, I don't want to sound like a paid plug for them. But I like them a lot.
My experience with Ting as a customer has been excellent. Rates are great, flexible, and sensible. Customer service has been good. Flexibility with onboarding used and refurbished phones has been easy.
For about what I paid for voice and SMS on Verizon a year ago, we have two smartphones and a hotspot running both a person and some hardware across the country. My tightwad father's adopted the service (his first cell phone), and has since added another line.
T-mobile is starting to do the right things, but Ting already is.
Only reason I didn't sign up is Sprint has bad reception here. If I wanted bad reception, I would have stayed with T-mobile.
Unless he was a T-Mobile customer in Europe, I don't see how this is possible. T-Mobile in the US was formed circa 2001 with the purchase of Voicestream Wireless. I remember because I've been a customer since 2002, and all their equipment was tagged with Voicestream logos.
Unless of course he was a Voicestream customer first, who was then rolled into T-Mobile. Who am I to say, I just pay attention to details.
Is there's anybody that knows of something faster than the ZTE-based phones?
It took me 25+ hours on hold and in the end I ended up tweeting them. Their twitter support team was a billion times better than anyone on the phone and the guy got it resolved for me.
Compare and contrast that with my previous experience with AT&T, and there was absolutely no comparison.
"Carriers are really nice to you... once every 23 months.
This is the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard in my
entire life. Do you have any idea how much you're paying?"
Refreshingly bizarre.
I've been using T-Mobile for five years or so and have always had really good customer service.
I was a T-Mobile customer until the first iPhone came out, and they were fantastic back then. I'd switch back now if it weren't for the fact that they have lousy coverage in Vermont.
Not just that, but in other countries (not the US) where they have the dominant market position, they seem just as despised as Verizon and AT&T are in the US.
Not that I'm complaining; I enjoy the consumer-side benefits of competition as much as the next guy - it's just good to remember exactly where things stand.
And as for the network, I'm fortunate that it's not a trade-off for me. T-Mobile's coverage has proven superior to AT&T's for my precise work/home/travel combination.
I recently moved to the $45 unlimited-everything plan on Straight Talk, which uses AT&T SIMs, and I'm pretty happy with it. (I don't know if they too throttle over 2GB, but I rarely hit it anyway.)
T-Mobile will not throttle until at least 5GB. In my experience they just don't throttle at all though.
http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans
Scroll down and you'll see '100 minutes talk | Unlimited text | First 5 GB at up to 4G speeds'
You have to buy the SIM card online and have them ship it to you; then you open it up and use the activation info in the box to set up the $30 plan and pay for your first month. It's pretty straightforward. When I did it the SIM only cost like a buck so it's pretty much as advertised - no hidden costs.
And the bar is pretty low in most regards when you're up against Verizon and AT&T's business practices...
It's not profitable for T-Mobile to sell you that device at $404 if they can get someone else to pay $1200. Yes, that's shitty, but from an economic perspective it doesn't make sense for them to sell that equipment to you. The equipment, even unsubsidized, is a loss leader for the service.
In short, it would be a good customer experience if they should you the phone, but it doesn't make economic sense.
Also, sort of unrelated, but I really don't understand all this T-Mobile love. The carriers went from eating a $400+ subsidy on every phone to eating $50 or less to acquire a new subscriber. The plans aren't THAT much cheaper, and they're still a joke compared to the cost of delivery (but I digress!).
I think T-Mobile is pro-consumer the same way AT&T is pro-consumer. They just happen to do a better job marketing it.
Apparently he used to be the Chief Executive of AT&T Asia. I wonder how cellular service plans are structured there. I know that Europe has traditionally favored the no-contract plans that are just now starting to get attention in the U.S., I wonder if perhaps Asia does too.
(Which is quite funny, 'cause I have to pay 0.11€ / minute for calling to other german carriers.)
At one point AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile, citing Verizon being bigger as why it was okay. They even put a bunch of money on the line if it fell through. Regulators decided that either they wanted 4 parties, or that Verizon would be forced to buy Sprint to compete, leaving 2 parties. (I am not 100% certain which they said was the reason)
All they are waiting for is the DOJ to make a mistake and let it slip through.
"T-Mobile exeutives say Sprint merger the 'logical conclusion'" http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/25/4769794/t-mobile-executive...
"Sprint executives echo T-Mobile merger message" http://www.kansascity.com/2013/09/26/4509601/sprint-executiv...
(The last time I went over 2GB was a year ago on TMO when my home internet wasn't yet installed, so for me it's basically academic.)
This was my realization when pricing out basic phone service with T-Mobile, ATT, etc. You have to really work hard to pay different. Just don't be afraid to break the contract, it's not a real penalty.
If you calculate the costs over a 2 year span, the differences are quite significant: http://jots.mypopescu.com/post/61007400356/iphone-5s-choosin...
_nb_: I haven't included any interest/depreciation rates though.
The trick is that most people don't replace their phones on a schedule. Some phones don't hold enough of a charge after 18 months and get replaced early; some people are still happy with their 4 year old phone. If you are on a pay-as-you-go plan and hold onto a phone for longer than 2 years, the savings start to really add up.
The other trick is that many people can get pay-as-you-go prices on contract, through their corporation, credit union, or university. When I was on AT&T in 2009, I used my university's alumni association to bring my cost down to $55 per month.
I just went to Verizon and chose a free SmartPhone (Droid 4) with a 500MB data plan. It was $80/mo 2 yr contract
I can buy that phone outright (brand new) for $300.
If I go to PagePlus (Verizon MVNO) and sign up for their $1200 Minute, $3000 Text/MMS 500MB $30/mo plan here is what I paid after two years.
Verizon - $80 * 24 = $1,920
PagePlus - $30 * 24 + $300 (phone) + $50 roaming (average usage cost for 2 yrs) = $1,020
And what did I get for my $900 difference? (That is $37.50/mo BTW) A big "Verizon" label on my phone, and a two year contract.
You could get two plans and phones from PagePlus and still pay less.
I realize that there are other factors like level of customer service, and no roaming charges that VZW and ATT die-hards will tell you about. Well, in my experience, the service is no better and most people almost never use roaming service while using a Verizon MVNO. I would say that i have only spent around $20 in the last two years from roaming.
Other factiods: Have Verizon or ATT and want to change your plan options (Minutes, Data amount ETC)? Sure - that will require a new two year contract. Don't want a new phone. Well you will still be paying the same regardless. Break the contract and you will still pay the same penalty. This seems to refute your claim that you are just paying back a subsidy.
Want a new phone with your new contract? OK, choose a "free" one from a list whose retail prices have a $150-$200 difference in price. Are you going to pay less per month if you opt for the cheaper (3g) free one? If your statement was true you should.
Have a look at http://www.apple.com/opensource/ - which outlines the Open Source components that Apple use and contribute to. You're right - it might not be as much as some other companies (though I don't know if it's practically less than Google or Sun) but they are consistently among the largest participants in Open Source among large tech companies.
Aside from LLVM/clang and WebKit (both of which are significant enough to deserve massive accolades all by themselves), you also have stuff like launchd (which didn't catch on outside Apple, but hardly their fault), libdispatch, and mDNS.
But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
The author of the Upstart init system, Scott James Remnant, wrote in 2006,
"How does [Upstart] differ from launchd?
launchd is the replacement init system used in MacOS X developed as an “Open Source” project by Apple. For much of its life so far, the licence has actually been entirely non-free and thus it has only become recently interesting with the licence change.
[...]
Had the licence been sufficiently free at the point we began development of our own system, we would probably have extended launchd rather than implement our own. At the point Apple changed the licence, our own system was already more suitable for our purposes."
Do you have any access to Google Search API? Or BigTable source? How about Google Maps? Google Apps? What Google is releasing is "Chrome" which stole(as like your word) from WebKit, and Android. (which actually stolen from Sun, so still in lawsuit)
Well there's more. V8, Dart and Go. Maybe bunch of funny dead projects can be included. But I don't see much difference with LLVM/Clang case. Let's treat them just apart.
IMO, Google is worse than Facebook or Twitter in perspective of server-side software contribution.
Oh wow you capitalized "A LOT". I am sure you'll be able to list at least 30 large known open source projects actively maintained or contributed to by Apple.
Knowing that I'm going to be travelling a fair amount in the near future on business, I'm not sure if it'd be worth gambling that the host network for my MVNO wouldn't be similarly over capacity elsewhere resulting in me getting lower priority.