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.<p>[1] <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/19/att-tmobile-merger-dead/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/19/att-tmobile-merger-dead/</a>
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!
Just in case anyone hasn't noticed this:<p>> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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).<p>At the airport, on the way home, I sent a text to my wife letting her know I was on the way. It failed.<p>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.<p>I had to pop my UK sim back in just to be able to use the phone again.<p>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 <i>all</i> the business from anybody who travels at all.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 <i>always</i> picks the strongest signal of all available wireless carriers.<p>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.<p>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.
List of countries here:
<a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp</a>
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.
This is very interesting. 128kbit is fast enough for Google Maps which is good enough for me.<p>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.
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?
This is great. Sometimes I travel out of the US and am pretty much phoneless unless I purchase a temp sim card or something.<p>T-Mobile is doing pretty disrupting things in the mobile service market and I hope it pays off for them.
I wonder if this'll be available with their ridiculously amazing $30 per month pre-paid plan.<p><a href="https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/b8c4a2164434" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/b8c4a2164434</a>
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.
My brother manages our family account with AT&T with 7 lines. I casually read the title of this post. His response? "We're switching."
I continue to be dumbfounded that intelligent people would call this "free". The degree to which marketing has invaded our everyday lives is astonishing.<p>It's not free, you're paying a monthly fee for it.