I guess they decided that Sprint's management was doing such a bang up job they should be the ones running the new company. Sort of like when Boeing merged with McDonall Douglass.
Yeah, this is the situation. Sievert has been groomed by Legere for this position for years. And Legere will still be in touch with him regularly, as he says on Twitter.
Man, I shoulda jumped shipped last time I upgraded and taken advantage of some deal some other carrier had for switching. Maybe that's the lesson for me: always switch carriers when it's time to upgrade.
I appreciate what John Legere did to stir some competition in the carrier space, so it's a bummer to see him go, and I have no doubt T-Mobile will slowly rollback all its consumer-friendly changes (not that they've continued to make many more in recent years).
T-Mobile had some crazy good deals in October before the merger was approved. I moved my 6 line family plan from Sprint to T-Mobile in anticipation of prices rising and reduced competition post-merger. After comparing notes with my friends, I'm paying the least per line for unlimited data and all the goodies that come with T-Mobile's Magenta Plus plan.
Yeah, TMO had some crazy good deals at the end of last year. I also switched from Sprint to TMO after moving from Sprint's "free" plan to whatever their normal (somewhat obscene) plan was for about a year.
On the TMO side, I got the buy 3 get 1 line for free Magenta promo, an insider account code/discount, and a $200 visa card per line. I think I'm paying about $112/month for four Magenta lines.
The thing is, I switched in the first place because TMO always shafted their existing customers and gave new port-ins great deals, so switching to a "good" Sprint deal allowed me to get a better deal going back to TMO.
I say "good" because it was $30+/month for 4 lines, but Sprint's network blows and the price it reset to was just nuts.
I was on AT&T and their roaming charged me $600 because I accidentally left it on, on a Vancouver trip for a day. They did refund some of that, but T-mobile's free roaming with 4G speeds is a game changer.
Overall T-Mobile has the best bang for buck if you live in an area where they have coverage.
Although US carriers are sometimes quite behind what other countries offer. I am constantly blown away at how cheap and fast cellular internet is in India with Jio. Or south korea, or japan.
Asian countries make US look like a joke when it comes to internet speed and cellular technology.
T-Mobile's free data and texting in many countries is the primary reason I stick with them despite being able to find lower prices and better coverage elsewhere.
Legere repackaged contracts slightly and sold it as snake oil. For the vast majority of customers, their contracts had the exact same impact. A two-year payment plan (which is, you guessed it, a "contract") on the phone which "immediately becomes due" if you cancel your plan is identical to the early termination fee that had previously been offered by everyone else, just in a slightly less bundled fashion.
If, like most people, you were buying a phone from your carrier, the cost at early termination was near identical. Verizon's ETF already reduced each month left on your phone's upgrade period, just like a phone payment plan would have.
Legere's a Jobsian marketing genius, but only because he managed to sell people the status quo as something new.
>"Unlimited data, free international roaming (with data!), and you can bring your own phone to any plan."
A couple of years ago an American company I worked for had T-mobile phones with a plan that included the free international roaming. This international roaming was 2G data by default. In many countries we had to visit these data plans for internet access were simply unusable because they were so slow. Opening pages a browser would simply time out. This would happen in large countries China, Australia and many European countries as well. The company ended up ditching T-Mobile as a result. While it was free in the sense that it allowed them to advertise it as such it was not functional.
I’ve travelled extensively T-Mobile free international data and it’s AMAZING. Europe, South America, and Africa. Yes it’s slow. No I wouldn’t do business with it. But holy shit the difference in “slow data” and “no data” is approximately infinite.
Yes and in China, most of South East Asia, all of Australia, all of India and nearly all the Middle East its NOT AMAZING as its completely unusable. It's also NOT AMAZING in many counties in Europe, such as Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and the Czech Republic from personal experience. Ditto for Urugay, Brazil and Bolivia in South America. So no you can't really just call out all of Europe and Africa and South America and say it's amazing.
When the alternative is to simply pop a local SIM into your phone and get working internet for the same $15 dollars it costs for the T-Mobile One World Plan what's the point exactly?
- without data, find open store
- wait in line for counter service
- choose prepaid package/carrier
- passport copy/screen: gov + random store
- store "forgets" to return passport
- run out of data due to opaque billing
- repeat
"waiting in line", "Choose a carrier" and "store forgets to return passport"?
You might as well add "having to breathe" and "tapping your debit card" to this list of hardhsips. This list is really quite laughable.
In many parts of the world you can get a SIM at a 24 hour convenience store and without a passport. And once you have the SIM you can almost always top them up on line. I think most people would consider the 5 minute time investment to be a fair tradeoff for working internet on their phone.
Countries vary. Travelers buy SIMs when it's easy (e.g. EU). Some countries have more regulation, surveillance, billing or account provisioning glitches.
IME they sell SIMs from a kiosk in the lobby of the airport. The guy can't go anywhere with your passport because there's nowhere to go. If he screws around just complain loudly; one of the military dudes with big guns will probably respond. b^)
Having had the “pleasure” to use T-mobile’s 2G international roaming once, and on a separate occasion be effectively capped to 2G on T-mobile’s domestic network through Google Fi for a while, I’d say the line between 2G and disconnected is getting blurrier by the day. Launching Uber and getting anything to load took like ten minutes, I was almost stranded for that.
So I use this everywhere in the world pretty much for years. It is very slow for web, but for just getting email and directions it worked great. If I needed faster I would just get a local SIM and stick it into an WifiAP that I have. You could also upgrade to LTE for your trip for a set fee by pressing on a link in the text msg they (t-mobile) sent you when you turned on the phone in the other country. For me not having to worry about my phone just working (even if it was slow) when I landed is a plus.
And and just be clear on what 2G speeds are on the T-Mobile plan with included "international data" its 128 Kbps! [1][2]. Try to open an email attachment or render a tile in mapping app with that. It's a non-starter.
It's quite amusing to me that sharing my experience with a specific carrier's international roaming plan would upset someone. Are people actually T-Mobile fan boys? I mean it's a telecom company for heaven's sake. Telecom is one of the sleaziest industries there is. Who cares?! They're all different degrees of shit.
For a little context during a 3 years period I was spending a little over 200 days a year on the road internationally with a work issued T-Mobile phone during that time. My experience is not unique either. You can check https://community.t-mobile.com/
Eh, for the longest time their "unlimited data" was a sham.
I was paying something like $50 for 2GB of high speed data, and "unlimited" data.
Except after the 2GB it was literally unusable, no matter the time of day or location. Even plain email would stop working, and webpages would never load.
A lot of unlimited plans will deprioritze you (slowing you down) after a limit, but usually that limit is higher, and even when you are deprioritized, it still remains useful most of the time.
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You can downvote all you want, they were running this scam well after the era of per MB overage fees.
In fact they’re still running this scam if you don’t manual switch to their more expensive “One” plan.
Considering that before this egregious overage charges were the norm, that's a huge improvement.
I'll acknowledge they market it a little misleadingly. But I'm a big fan of anything that removes bill-shock which was a fairly normal problem before T-Mobile got into the market (both for local data overages and international data usage).
> Yes, Party Pay is available to all active Visible members. Real (or chosen) families, roommates, frenemies, or total strangers just looking for some sweet savings.
I didn't have to look for 4 people, their subreddit has hundreds of links you can join for 4 people.
My family has remained on the Verizon data cap plans. They cost vastly less than their newer "unlimited" brethren... and never slow down my data speeds.
If anything was a colossal travesty, it was Legere bringing "unlimited" data back from the dead.
That is unusual. The average cellular data use is 5-10GB for unlimited and 1.5-2 for limited plans. Both average 15-20GB for data+wifi so the limited plan users are just being more careful about being connected.
I can’t say what people should do, but they use their phones to watch video, do video chats, play games, upload and backup photos, etc.
I used well past my 2GB of T-mobile unlimited most months and never really noticed a slow down. Of course, my main use is email and reading which is not very bandwidth heavy anyway. I imagine most people are like me.
I agree with you, but please know that commenting on downvotes is likely to bring downvotes from people who otherwise wouldn't. One of the site rules discourages commenting on votes.
This is not different than Verizon, and never was. (It was hard to get a phone that supported Verizon from anywhere else due to band differences largely, but if you had an unlocked phone that could run Verizon's network, they were and still are legally obligated to activate it.)
T-Mobile just claimed their payment plan, which shafted you if you canceled service, wasn't an ETF (it is), and Verizon just said their early termination fee was part of the plan, though it was really paying off the rest of the phone (which it did). In both cases, you're paying off a phone you bought, and keeping it after ending service.
The only real difference was that in the past, you were "paying for the phone" on Verizon monthly even if you didn't actually upgrade/buy a phone from them. But since the vast majority of people buy phones from their carrier, it really impacted the bottom line very, very little. The HN crowd over-represents in the tiny group of people that would bring an outside phone to their carrier.
A change which materially impacts less than 5% of your customers isn't game-changing, but T-Mobile marketed it like it was important to 100% of their customers.
Verizon and Sprint were primarily built on CDMA networks, which generally didn't use SIM cards. They wouldn't work internationally largely because they were incompatible radios. The phones have the unique identifiers hardcoded into the phones, but could be added to a compatible carrier's network.
(Bear in mind, a SIM is really just a hardware manifestation of a unique identifier and some settings. It's not impossible to do these things entirely digitally, and now with eSIM, that is happening on GSM/LTE networks as well.)
> The HN crowd over-represents in the tiny group of people that would bring an outside phone to their carrier.
IMHO, not really - HN is niche compared to everyone who was using HowardForums to hack on their Motorola and Nokia phones back in the day, myself included. T-Mobile was on the 900/1800 (?) spectrum which matched Europe and other places you could buy eBay phones, and T-Mobile was always free and open to people doing this. You could call support and get someone to help you with adding the right APNs and whatnot, they were always the "un-carrier" to many of us.
Even if the functional difference is minimal, I'd still argue that it is a net positive to present the deal in a straight forward way.
There's also a lessened urgency to upgrade phones under the T-Mobile model. There's still the Jump program, for those who do want to keep on a trade-in cycle, but if you're happy with you're phone you get rewarded with a lower bill at the end for sticking with it until you aren't.
T-Mobile spun out the phone+plan bundle. This is a good thing for customers. People like me who didn't need a phone still had to pay the built-in premium with plans and contracts. T-Mobile also got rid of contracts. They provide promos to get the same discount that contracts provided but it's opt-in.
> "If, like most people, you were buying a phone from your carrier"
Most people bought a phone from their carrier because it was so heavily subsidized and the plans were so expensive. If you broke your phone, you were out a huge amount of money, AND you had an expensive plan to boot.
T-Mobile did the right thing and gave consumers an option.
In 2015 my girlfriend needed to go on a long road trip. But her iPhone was dead toast.
Soooo we go to the Verizon store. The cheapest options were either to buy a 200$ 'flip' phone (not smartphone, just a flip phone) up front, or to get a new contract and lock in.
Mind you, By this time in 2015 it was very easy to find sub-75$ prepaid Android phones. In Brick and mortar stores. Hell Verizon even sold a couple, but you weren't allowed to bring them onto a postpaid plan (lol).
I wound up spending less than 100$ on a Lumia 521 (yeah, lol winphone, but the map app (HERE drive) had great offline map downloading support which suited her purpose,) and putting her on my TMO for a while.
If you looked at the top end of the market back then, yeah, there wasn't much real difference between what TMO did and a normal contract. But at the lower end of the market it made a huge difference, that's why TMO won so much of that market.
And somehow it would have been better if the merger wasn’t allowed and Sprint went out of business? Sprint has been losing money and customers for a decade. SoftBank was getting tired of backing them.
Very possibly yes. That would be a chance for additional entities to bid on Sprint's spectrum, or even to break that spectrum up. When irreplaceable assets like that are concentrated into the hands of a few bigger and bigger companies, the whole economy becomes less dynamic.
Who would these additional entities be besides other major carriers - probably the larger two? What smaller entity could afford to build out a network, open retail stores, get customers from the major carriers, etc?
I see this opinion a lot. I guess the argument is that we are going from 4 cell providers to 3, but realistically Sprint and TMobile were so minor we are probably going from 2 providers to 3
This. Neither T-Mobile or Sprint ever rank as legitimate carriers for most cases. Find me a enterprise business that equips their employees with either. Pretty much all corporate and government wireless is AT&T or Verizon.
T-Mobile + Sprint provides the best opportunity to create a legitimate third carrier.
I'll become interested in the kabuki once there is any indication of an actual increase in competitive pressure on ATT or Verizon, of which there is currently close to zero.
I'm not sure about "either", but Google-Fi is both - ie service from both Sprint+T-Mobile on one device.
Unfortunately, given the shutdown plans for the Sprint side of the combined network, I'm not convinced (though remain hopeful) that this will be competition to AT&T and Verizon.
Presumably the fact that Fi is consider a decent enough cell network suggests this merger will succeed at its goals. I wouldn't expect T-Mobile to shut down Sprint's network without adequately replacing it. The merge plan probably includes shutting down 'extra' towers that are adequately covered by the other network, but probably retaining and upgrading any towers with coverage unique to only one network.
T-Mobile's coverage area almost completely encompasses the coverage provided by Sprint and also covers a lot of areas Sprint does not. This merger also makes T-Mobile by far the largest owner of sub-6 GHz cellular spectrum in the US. As long as they invest wisely they should have no trouble building a network fully competitive with AT&T and Verizon.
T-Mobile is fairly popular in the SMB space and with companies that are "large-ish" with 500-750 employees. They are competitive there.
Though mostly I agree it's Verizon / AT&T in the large corp space. Should be interesting to see if this merger can penetrate the corporate ranks. My guess is probably not, but TMO/Sprint will continue to win marketshare at the consumer/individual level.
FYI, the coverage for the 2 networks will remain separate for now and will be gradually merged into a single network over the next few years. T-mobile is offering a $15/month 2GB prepaid plan as part of the sweetener to get regulators to approve the merger and AT&T has followed suit with a competing plan. Dish Network has been earmarked as the future 4th carrier for the USA and will be getting access to spectrum as part of the merger deal.
In my own opinion this merger is a good thing. Sprint holds huge amounts of spectrum but has absolutely failed to create a competitive network with it. It was a misallocation of a precious natural resource.
T-Mobile is doing great. The merger with Sprint gives them access to more frequencies for better coverage/speed. I can't say for sure how well Dish will do, but if they have good service/support/prices, then hopefully they will do fine. Better to have a stronger T-Mobile to keep ATT and Verizon on their toes.
Just because Dish has the airwave rights doesn’t mean it will be used for personal mobile telephony - could Dish be using it for other purposes, such as fixed point-to-point transmission - or a StarLink competitor? (Disclaimer: I have no idea if those frequency bands are suitable for satellite comms or not).
Dish owns a lot of terrestrial-use spectrum, but it's mostly oddball frequencies nobody else in the world is using for cellular service today. IIRC the most "standard" band they own is band 71 (600 MHz, also used by T-Mobile) and a bit of band 66 (standard AWS-3, used by all US carriers), but the rest of their spectrum is band 29 (supplemental downlink only), band 70 (unique to Dish), and (with this merger) band 26 (currently unique to Sprint). They certainly could launch cell service using it but they would pretty much have to custom-order base stations and phones to match the frequency bands they own. This was another problem that Sprint faced (with requiring band 25, 26, and 41 which were all unique to them in the US market).
Sprint literally had to give their service away it was so bad. They ran that first year free promotion for years. I'm not sure the other networks were exactly quaking in their boots over that "competition." Verizon and AT&T have always been the first class carriers. If T-mobile can fully catch up to them in coverage that increases competition instead of diminishing it.
I agree that Dish is unlikely to become a major player. This is a desperation move for them as their satellite business dies.
I can echo this experience. Dealing with Sprint was impossible. Sometimes trying to pay them more money was impossible. The best thing TMobile could do is migrate the customers to the current TMobile infrastructure and software and shred everything at Sprint. Or maybe better, try to convince AT&T or Verizon to buy/adopt it as a form of sabotage.
>> Everything about this looks terrible for consumers. There's even less competition.
Sprint was giving away service, devices, and running promos on top of all of that. Still consumers didn't buy it. What do you want to happen in a situation like this? There was "competition" in the space but consumers had zero interest in engaging with them.
Hard to consider it "dumping" when you look at competitive offerings. For example, Comcast (Xfinity Mobile) offers a $12/month 1GB prepaid plan, and they don't even own the networks they use. $15/month for 2GB on your own network is entirely reasonable.
I assume buying mobile service from sellers other than the network owner themselves makes you a second class citizen on the network and subject to throttling or whatever QoS they use to make your traffic lower priority.
I even assume that you are getting prioritized depending on how much you pay or how politically important you are for the networks. I.e. a $20 prepaid ATT customer is lower priority than a $80 post paid unlimited customer which is lower priority than a US Senator.
Yes, I was agreeing that it isn't dumping since it's a different product since the services are lower priority than more expensive ones. But it's not explicitly stated, which now that I think about it, should be a required disclosure.
For instance, Straight Talk on AT&T isn't (or wasn't) even throttled. Other MVNOs, even if they were throttled on Verizon, were still quicker than Sprint's network.
I've had a $30/mo 5GB prepaid plan from Tmobile for about 10 years now (the "walmart plan"). To this date I've not seen anything cheaper. $15/2G is getting close though.
Same! until I switched to Mint Mobile just a few months ago because I was regularly hitting the bandwidth limit. I wish Google Fi was price competitive and didn't have conflicts with Google Voice, but it's just not there.
I went from a $70 per month plan to mint mobile and now I don't even remember what I pay because it is so much cheaper ($15 or less for 2GB). I love paying for a year at a time through a really clean interface, getting a discount AND not caring about bills. The reception of t-mobile is not always great and mint uses T-Mobile, but I'm a mint shill now.
T-Mobile was so terrible I couldn't even pay my bill in their store. Their service was awful and if you couldn't do something online you might as well forget it. It turned into modern banking, where going to a physical location would just get you people telling you they can't do anything and that you have to everything through their website while pretending that that isn't ridiculous.
I've been using Mint Mobile for a few years. If you're ok being on an MVNO they use T-Mobile towers and offer an 8 GB, $20/mo plan, hotspot included. It includes unlimited calling unlike the discontinued Walmart plan.
This may be true, but fyi, it isn't necessarily true - the MVNO is the one that sets the data charges in this case. If Mint did the right thing, I'm glad, though.
> short term discount to break into a market niche?
Dumping generally related to international trade and describes selling at a loss to drive off competition [1].
It is not clear T-Mobile is selling the plan at a loss. And it has no hope of driving AT&T or Verizon out of the wireless market. This is plain old discounting, not dumping.
> In my own opinion this merger is a good thing. Sprint holds huge amounts of spectrum but has absolutely failed to create a competitive network with it. It was a misallocation of a precious natural resource.
as far as I see the same Sprint CEO is continuing as the CEO of the merged company so I don't think things will improve. If he failed to create a competitive network then how are things to improve all of a sudden?
That is not the case. The T-mobile COO, Mike Sievert, will be taking over the combined company as part of a succession plan that's reportedly been in the works for awhile.
I think that the first-class Google Fi devices have shown a path where CDMA and UMTS networks like Sprint and T-Mobiles can coexist on the same phone. Basically, the phone uses geolocation and a database of signal strength to determine which network to prefer in a particular location. It hangs up the baseband on one network and switches to the other. (Disclaimer: work for Google but not on the Android or Fi teams. Know nothing that isn't public.)
T-Mobile will be shutting down the Sprint CDMA, LTE, and 5G NR networks, and the T-Mobile UMTS network will probably also be shut down around the same time leaving just the T-Mobile LTE and 5G NR networks. While the Sprint network is still running existing Sprint customers will have access to both the Sprint network and (on a "roaming" basis) the T-Mobile network but T-Mobile customers will not have access to the Sprint network.
WiMAX might not have been wrong if Sprint hasn’t flubbed the launch. Sprint had working WiMAX in many markets long before anyone had LTE, and there was a decent portfolio of laptops and such that had working client support. But Sprint never marketed it and wouldn’t sell it even if you knew about it unless you had a billing address in one of the few tiny markets that had official support. I would gladly have paid Sprint for their service if they would have been willing to sell it to me.
It’s hard to recover one’s investment if you refuse to sell the product you built.
I had Sprint WiMAX for my primary home internet connection for a while -- but I could literally see the tower out of my window. I loved it at the time.
But I was in the center of a pretty decent sized city. There wasn't even service in the burbs at that point, and by the time it got there, LTE was already a thing and Sprint was stuck with only a couple of odd-ball devices for their 4G network.
Momentum means a lot. It's hard to make money selling your service if the devices that people want don't support it.
It was like ~2010/2011 when WiMAX was a really hot tech. The iPhone 5 launched with LTE in 2012.
WiMAX was a sweet idea but worked liked shit in reality... I know, I worked for Clear at launch selling it. I couldn't even use it in my apartment 10 blocks away from a tower. We actually had to install a special tower, in our store, because it got no signal either...
It was so frustrating to sell something and have it returned because they didn't have service even though we said they did. Metal roof? That's no good. Metal building? That's worse. Concrete? Sorry. Wood? Maybe... if you're not blocked by a large metal or concrete building. Oh too many people joined and now you don't get a reliable signal?
They refused to sell it to you because it wouldn't have worked.
It also fucked with certain satellite radio frequencies and other weird shit you wouldn't expect.
WiMAX was a 10/10 idea, but a 0/10 everything else.
Canada's providers decided to shut down CDMA in favor of an all-LTE network, and I think they're better off for it.
I really hope that we could see that in the next five years for Sprint/T-mo: existing Sprint customers get upgraded to LTE and/or 5G devices, and then the CDMA network gets turned off in 2025 or 2030, and the bandwidth repurposed for 5G or 6G or whatever.
Sprint still requires CDMA for voice service in some areas. They've been by far the slowest to adopt VoLTE of the big 4 carriers in the US, the others all fully support VoLTE in all areas.
Sprint's towers were built for it's CDMA network running in the 1900 MHz spectrum. However, their LTE network primarily run at the 2.5GHz spectrum which has far less range/requires a different cell tower spacing. As a result, they have coverage gaps on the LTE network. If they moved to VoLTE, they'd drop a lot of calls due to the gaps, so they've primarily kept voice on the CDMA network.
>In my own opinion this merger is a good thing. Sprint holds huge amounts of spectrum but has absolutely failed to create a competitive network with it. It was a misallocation of a precious natural resource.
Yes. Not from US but as far as I am aware there are pretty much only 2 Network in US, AT&T and Verizon. With T-Mobile and Sprint being a verydistant third and fourth. Basically they are so minor that even they have combined they are still a distant third. But it does gives them a fighting chance, assuming they follow on with their T-Mobile orderly execution.
Hopefully this would bring US closer to world quality standard in terms of Mobile Network. Because as far as I can tell it has possibly the worst mobile network out of all the developed countries.
( Edit: Sorry I forgot Canada, which I have heard is similar to US.)
According to this 2018 article from The Verge[1], the new T-Mobile will have 90 million customers putting it just behind AT&T (at 93 million) and slightly farther behind Verizon (116 million). The New T-Mobile's customer base will still be more heavily weighted towards lower-cost prepaid customers rather than higher-cost postpaid consumer and business customers compared to their competitors so they will probably remain behind them in ARPU.
Depending on where you live, that's not accurate. T-Mobile is perfectly adequate (and sometimes even better) compared to AT&T and Verizon, except in more rural and isolated places.
I don't live in a rural area (~1000 people/sq. mile), 40 miles away from NYC. At least as of a year ago, T-Mobile's coverage map of my area was "occasional service outdoors".
I live in LA, and when switched to T-Mobile from Verizon (10 years ago). I had better experience with coverage in T-Mobile than I had with Verizon (for example it didn't work in nearby Costco). I'm sure it isn't an issue right now, but basically back then T-Mobile didn't feel at all like a downgrade.
The way I see it, T-Mobile is Daddy and Sprint is Mommy in this merger. Theoretically, this merger should only be additive to existing T-Mobile customers. Not to say there aren't ways this could go badly as well, but I'm fine with the plan I have now, and I don't see any downsides to my service provider increasing the spectrum available to them.
There are some concerns around reduced competition, but I'm thinking that might not actually be a concern in the same few years it will take to gauge how this merger actually shaped the market, e.g. StarLink. Even if something like StarLink doesn't pan out, and Dish as a cellular provider turns out to be dead in the water, having three carriers on almost entirely even ground competing is probably better than having two strong carriers, one flashy but still generally uncompetitive carrier and one dead fish carrier. Probably better to not even bother trying to prop up Dish to be #4, but this is what the regulators have decided to push for in their attempts to throw the right levers and twist the right knobs to maintain "competition".
funny thing, in 2012 Sprint wanted to acquire TMobile. Couldn't pass through the DOJ. TMobile used the failed merger money to build their network. And now the circle is complete, with TMobile, buying out Sprint.
I don't remember Sprint and TMO trying to merge back then.
ATT and TMO certainly did. And yes it worked out gangbusters for them because it wasn't -just- the money for the deal falling through, but the 'free roaming' that TMO users got on ATT networks.
This was HUGE for TMO at the time. They didn't have any lower band spectrum (Sub 1000mhz). But ATT obviously did because they were earlier into the game.
This helped them a lot, both as far as general coverage as well as usability in areas with lots of buildings and the like. By the time the agreement was running out they had purchased that sweet sweet 700mhz band and were rolling it out.
I see a lot of love for Legere in this thread, but I remember him as the guy who influenced his devout followers to attack the EFF just because the EFF rightly criticized one of his moves.
Edit: The move being lying about throttling. His exact words were: "who the fuck are you, anyway, EFF? ... Why are you stirring up so much trouble, and who pays you?"
John Legere didn't take over as CEO until 2012 and one of John Legere's biggest early moves (in 2013) was eliminating contracts, so I think your anger over that issue is a bit misplaced.
He was the CEO when I was trying to get T-Mobile to resolve my problem in a reasonable way. He may not have invented the unconscionable contracts, but he certainly could have simply stopped enforcing them.
Also, I'm less than convinced that he was somehow a leader in eliminating contracts. I think it was simply an inevitable result of changing economics, and he was likely just dragged along with everyone else.
There is strange uptick of "love" of corporate leaders all over social media for some reason. Certainly PR is at play, but also it's likely that the internet and social media has become more popular and attracted more uniformed masses. Just the other day on reddit, there was a Gates' thread and the "love" there was cult like.
We'll see what happens with T mobile in the coming years, but Legere definitely made T mobile just feel way better. They started adding all these seemingly weird features as part of their plans but it has made me a customer for 5 years. I get free WiFi on a lot of flights, 15GB of hotspot for updating my Tesla, Netflix, and international which is my favorite thing about it. I get unlimited texting and data in almost every country and I've tried it in Peru, Morocco, Iceland, Mexico, KURDISTAN, etc. It's small things and honestly I could probably save money if I just managed all those features myself but it really made my phone plan just feel more useful. My girl and I also signed on every Tuesday to see if we'd get a free coffee or donut on T mobile Tuesdays. Call me a sucker but he really did make T Mobile feel fun and exiting.
Kind of like Elon Musk. He called that guy a rapist and he's a bit weird/asshole, but he also made several successful companies that have benefited the world in a positive way. The world isn't black and white and I honestly think people should be judged by the combined weight of their sins and deeds. We're complex human beings.
You've copy pasted the same text twice in this thread. You are literally spamming your support for [someone who lied about throttling then attacked, via despicable rhetorical methods, attacked an organization for bringing the truth to light. By definition, a manipulative liar.]
He was flashy, which people seemed to like, but he was a game player in the worst way. When lobbying the Trump administration, do we remember where he directed his people to stay? Hint: it wasn’t the Mayflower.
It can be good to have less choices if T-Mobile/Sprint can become more competitive than they were separately. I am not sure if they are actually going to become more competitive but there is a possibility.
Sprint has competed by giving stuff away for free. My wife and I have free (latest) iPhones and are on a plan that’s cheaper than anything their competitors offer. Everything else about them is objectively worse (features, reliability, service coverage). I definitely believe they would not be in business much longer, which is why I’m excited about the merger.
If they had a chance of surviving in a meaningful, competitive way, then I’d definitely disagree with a merger, but I’ve not seen a strong argument that they would.
As I understand it, in the U.S. a business has to actually engage in anti-competitive practices in order to be punished, while Europe doesn't really have the concept of a benevolent monopoly, which is why lots of corporations get hit by antitrust laws in Europe for doing the same things they get away with in America.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadI appreciate what John Legere did to stir some competition in the carrier space, so it's a bummer to see him go, and I have no doubt T-Mobile will slowly rollback all its consumer-friendly changes (not that they've continued to make many more in recent years).
On the TMO side, I got the buy 3 get 1 line for free Magenta promo, an insider account code/discount, and a $200 visa card per line. I think I'm paying about $112/month for four Magenta lines.
The thing is, I switched in the first place because TMO always shafted their existing customers and gave new port-ins great deals, so switching to a "good" Sprint deal allowed me to get a better deal going back to TMO.
I say "good" because it was $30+/month for 4 lines, but Sprint's network blows and the price it reset to was just nuts.
Overall T-Mobile has the best bang for buck if you live in an area where they have coverage.
Although US carriers are sometimes quite behind what other countries offer. I am constantly blown away at how cheap and fast cellular internet is in India with Jio. Or south korea, or japan.
Asian countries make US look like a joke when it comes to internet speed and cellular technology.
If, like most people, you were buying a phone from your carrier, the cost at early termination was near identical. Verizon's ETF already reduced each month left on your phone's upgrade period, just like a phone payment plan would have.
Legere's a Jobsian marketing genius, but only because he managed to sell people the status quo as something new.
T-Mobile was very different and I hope it stays that way.
A couple of years ago an American company I worked for had T-mobile phones with a plan that included the free international roaming. This international roaming was 2G data by default. In many countries we had to visit these data plans for internet access were simply unusable because they were so slow. Opening pages a browser would simply time out. This would happen in large countries China, Australia and many European countries as well. The company ended up ditching T-Mobile as a result. While it was free in the sense that it allowed them to advertise it as such it was not functional.
When the alternative is to simply pop a local SIM into your phone and get working internet for the same $15 dollars it costs for the T-Mobile One World Plan what's the point exactly?
You might as well add "having to breathe" and "tapping your debit card" to this list of hardhsips. This list is really quite laughable.
In many parts of the world you can get a SIM at a 24 hour convenience store and without a passport. And once you have the SIM you can almost always top them up on line. I think most people would consider the 5 minute time investment to be a fair tradeoff for working internet on their phone.
It's quite amusing to me that sharing my experience with a specific carrier's international roaming plan would upset someone. Are people actually T-Mobile fan boys? I mean it's a telecom company for heaven's sake. Telecom is one of the sleaziest industries there is. Who cares?! They're all different degrees of shit.
For a little context during a 3 years period I was spending a little over 200 days a year on the road internationally with a work issued T-Mobile phone during that time. My experience is not unique either. You can check https://community.t-mobile.com/
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffreymorrison/2018/02/07/how...
[2] https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/roaming
I was paying something like $50 for 2GB of high speed data, and "unlimited" data.
Except after the 2GB it was literally unusable, no matter the time of day or location. Even plain email would stop working, and webpages would never load.
A lot of unlimited plans will deprioritze you (slowing you down) after a limit, but usually that limit is higher, and even when you are deprioritized, it still remains useful most of the time.
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You can downvote all you want, they were running this scam well after the era of per MB overage fees.
In fact they’re still running this scam if you don’t manual switch to their more expensive “One” plan.
I'll acknowledge they market it a little misleadingly. But I'm a big fan of anything that removes bill-shock which was a fairly normal problem before T-Mobile got into the market (both for local data overages and international data usage).
I actually should have switched back but didn’t feel it was worth it the effort at the time.
Last month I cancelled and switched to Visible, which is an MVNO with unlimited data for 25$, there are similarly competitive networks out there now
> Yes, Party Pay is available to all active Visible members. Real (or chosen) families, roommates, frenemies, or total strangers just looking for some sweet savings.
I didn't have to look for 4 people, their subreddit has hundreds of links you can join for 4 people.
If anything was a colossal travesty, it was Legere bringing "unlimited" data back from the dead.
I can’t say what people should do, but they use their phones to watch video, do video chats, play games, upload and backup photos, etc.
T-Mobile just claimed their payment plan, which shafted you if you canceled service, wasn't an ETF (it is), and Verizon just said their early termination fee was part of the plan, though it was really paying off the rest of the phone (which it did). In both cases, you're paying off a phone you bought, and keeping it after ending service.
The only real difference was that in the past, you were "paying for the phone" on Verizon monthly even if you didn't actually upgrade/buy a phone from them. But since the vast majority of people buy phones from their carrier, it really impacted the bottom line very, very little. The HN crowd over-represents in the tiny group of people that would bring an outside phone to their carrier.
A change which materially impacts less than 5% of your customers isn't game-changing, but T-Mobile marketed it like it was important to 100% of their customers.
As an international traveler, I've never even considered Verizon or Sprint as I would never be able to pop another SIM from a different country.
(Bear in mind, a SIM is really just a hardware manifestation of a unique identifier and some settings. It's not impossible to do these things entirely digitally, and now with eSIM, that is happening on GSM/LTE networks as well.)
IMHO, not really - HN is niche compared to everyone who was using HowardForums to hack on their Motorola and Nokia phones back in the day, myself included. T-Mobile was on the 900/1800 (?) spectrum which matched Europe and other places you could buy eBay phones, and T-Mobile was always free and open to people doing this. You could call support and get someone to help you with adding the right APNs and whatnot, they were always the "un-carrier" to many of us.
There's also a lessened urgency to upgrade phones under the T-Mobile model. There's still the Jump program, for those who do want to keep on a trade-in cycle, but if you're happy with you're phone you get rewarded with a lower bill at the end for sticking with it until you aren't.
About half of all phones sold in the US are iPhones and probably more on the major carriers.
Apple sells a lot of phones both online and in their retail stores and have their own payment plans.
You can buy an unlocked phone from Apple and optionally have it registered with one if the major providers.
Most people bought a phone from their carrier because it was so heavily subsidized and the plans were so expensive. If you broke your phone, you were out a huge amount of money, AND you had an expensive plan to boot.
T-Mobile did the right thing and gave consumers an option.
I'll give you a very real life example.
In 2015 my girlfriend needed to go on a long road trip. But her iPhone was dead toast.
Soooo we go to the Verizon store. The cheapest options were either to buy a 200$ 'flip' phone (not smartphone, just a flip phone) up front, or to get a new contract and lock in.
Mind you, By this time in 2015 it was very easy to find sub-75$ prepaid Android phones. In Brick and mortar stores. Hell Verizon even sold a couple, but you weren't allowed to bring them onto a postpaid plan (lol).
I wound up spending less than 100$ on a Lumia 521 (yeah, lol winphone, but the map app (HERE drive) had great offline map downloading support which suited her purpose,) and putting her on my TMO for a while.
If you looked at the top end of the market back then, yeah, there wasn't much real difference between what TMO did and a normal contract. But at the lower end of the market it made a huge difference, that's why TMO won so much of that market.
Sprint’s network is already the worse one.
T-Mobile + Sprint provides the best opportunity to create a legitimate third carrier.
But I'm betting there won't be. (Literally.)
Unfortunately, given the shutdown plans for the Sprint side of the combined network, I'm not convinced (though remain hopeful) that this will be competition to AT&T and Verizon.
Though mostly I agree it's Verizon / AT&T in the large corp space. Should be interesting to see if this merger can penetrate the corporate ranks. My guess is probably not, but TMO/Sprint will continue to win marketshare at the consumer/individual level.
In my own opinion this merger is a good thing. Sprint holds huge amounts of spectrum but has absolutely failed to create a competitive network with it. It was a misallocation of a precious natural resource.
If Sprint and T-Mobile are having such a hard time creating competitive networks, what are the chances that Dish will be able to do it from scratch?
Everything about this looks terrible for consumers. There's even less competition.
It certainly will be used for that, unless they've been lying to everyone: http://about.dish.com/2019-07-26-DISH-to-Become-National-Fac...
I agree that Dish is unlikely to become a major player. This is a desperation move for them as their satellite business dies.
Sprint was giving away service, devices, and running promos on top of all of that. Still consumers didn't buy it. What do you want to happen in a situation like this? There was "competition" in the space but consumers had zero interest in engaging with them.
A short term discount to break into a market niche? That looks like overy antitrust "dumping".
I even assume that you are getting prioritized depending on how much you pay or how politically important you are for the networks. I.e. a $20 prepaid ATT customer is lower priority than a $80 post paid unlimited customer which is lower priority than a US Senator.
For instance, Straight Talk on AT&T isn't (or wasn't) even throttled. Other MVNOs, even if they were throttled on Verizon, were still quicker than Sprint's network.
T-Mobile was so terrible I couldn't even pay my bill in their store. Their service was awful and if you couldn't do something online you might as well forget it. It turned into modern banking, where going to a physical location would just get you people telling you they can't do anything and that you have to everything through their website while pretending that that isn't ridiculous.
https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/plan-detail/t-mobile-connect
Dumping generally related to international trade and describes selling at a loss to drive off competition [1].
It is not clear T-Mobile is selling the plan at a loss. And it has no hope of driving AT&T or Verizon out of the wireless market. This is plain old discounting, not dumping.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
as far as I see the same Sprint CEO is continuing as the CEO of the merged company so I don't think things will improve. If he failed to create a competitive network then how are things to improve all of a sudden?
Sprint is the world champion of picking the wrong wireless technology.
Think I have still have some iDEN and WiMAX devices in a drawer somewhere.
It’s hard to recover one’s investment if you refuse to sell the product you built.
But I was in the center of a pretty decent sized city. There wasn't even service in the burbs at that point, and by the time it got there, LTE was already a thing and Sprint was stuck with only a couple of odd-ball devices for their 4G network.
Momentum means a lot. It's hard to make money selling your service if the devices that people want don't support it.
It was like ~2010/2011 when WiMAX was a really hot tech. The iPhone 5 launched with LTE in 2012.
It was so frustrating to sell something and have it returned because they didn't have service even though we said they did. Metal roof? That's no good. Metal building? That's worse. Concrete? Sorry. Wood? Maybe... if you're not blocked by a large metal or concrete building. Oh too many people joined and now you don't get a reliable signal?
They refused to sell it to you because it wouldn't have worked.
It also fucked with certain satellite radio frequencies and other weird shit you wouldn't expect.
WiMAX was a 10/10 idea, but a 0/10 everything else.
I really hope that we could see that in the next five years for Sprint/T-mo: existing Sprint customers get upgraded to LTE and/or 5G devices, and then the CDMA network gets turned off in 2025 or 2030, and the bandwidth repurposed for 5G or 6G or whatever.
Yes. Not from US but as far as I am aware there are pretty much only 2 Network in US, AT&T and Verizon. With T-Mobile and Sprint being a very distant third and fourth. Basically they are so minor that even they have combined they are still a distant third. But it does gives them a fighting chance, assuming they follow on with their T-Mobile orderly execution.
Hopefully this would bring US closer to world quality standard in terms of Mobile Network. Because as far as I can tell it has possibly the worst mobile network out of all the developed countries. ( Edit: Sorry I forgot Canada, which I have heard is similar to US.)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/30/17301392/t-mobile-sprint-...
There are some concerns around reduced competition, but I'm thinking that might not actually be a concern in the same few years it will take to gauge how this merger actually shaped the market, e.g. StarLink. Even if something like StarLink doesn't pan out, and Dish as a cellular provider turns out to be dead in the water, having three carriers on almost entirely even ground competing is probably better than having two strong carriers, one flashy but still generally uncompetitive carrier and one dead fish carrier. Probably better to not even bother trying to prop up Dish to be #4, but this is what the regulators have decided to push for in their attempts to throw the right levers and twist the right knobs to maintain "competition".
ATT and TMO certainly did. And yes it worked out gangbusters for them because it wasn't -just- the money for the deal falling through, but the 'free roaming' that TMO users got on ATT networks.
This was HUGE for TMO at the time. They didn't have any lower band spectrum (Sub 1000mhz). But ATT obviously did because they were earlier into the game.
This helped them a lot, both as far as general coverage as well as usability in areas with lots of buildings and the like. By the time the agreement was running out they had purchased that sweet sweet 700mhz band and were rolling it out.
Edit: The move being lying about throttling. His exact words were: "who the fuck are you, anyway, EFF? ... Why are you stirring up so much trouble, and who pays you?"
Compared with his industry counterparts, Legere was a breath of fresh air.
What is the "myopic view" in this situation? That poisoning the well is a good strategy for deflecting criticism of your dishonesty?
(About a decade ago, I got trapped in a contract with T-Mobile and ended up forfeiting almost $1500.)
Also, I'm less than convinced that he was somehow a leader in eliminating contracts. I think it was simply an inevitable result of changing economics, and he was likely just dragged along with everyone else.
There is strange uptick of "love" of corporate leaders all over social media for some reason. Certainly PR is at play, but also it's likely that the internet and social media has become more popular and attracted more uniformed masses. Just the other day on reddit, there was a Gates' thread and the "love" there was cult like.
Kind of like Elon Musk. He called that guy a rapist and he's a bit weird/asshole, but he also made several successful companies that have benefited the world in a positive way. The world isn't black and white and I honestly think people should be judged by the combined weight of their sins and deeds. We're complex human beings.
For the record, I actually have T-Mobile and it is acceptable. I can't wait for service to get worse as it inevitably does after such mergers.
If they had a chance of surviving in a meaningful, competitive way, then I’d definitely disagree with a merger, but I’ve not seen a strong argument that they would.
I thought it was he who was supposed to lead the merged Co...