Customers on 3G or 4G-era price plans are getting moved to T-Mobile\u2019s newer rate plans whether they like it or not\u00a0It\u2019s all about providing everyone with a better 5G experience, according to T-Mobile CMO Allan Samson\u00a0Some customers will see price increases of $4 per line, but T-Mobile says a \u201cvery big portion\u201d won\u2019t see any increase<\/p>\n
Some T-Mobile customers are being notified today that they\u2019re getting moved to newer, sometimes pricier, rate plans. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Basically, a lot of customers are on plans so old that they can\u2019t experience the full greatness of T-Mobile\u2019s current 5G and 5G Advanced network. At least, that\u2019s how they\u2019re justifying the switch.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think ultimately it will improve their experience with us,\u201d T-Mobile Chief Marketing Officer Allan Samson told Fierce.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A segment of customers will see a price increase of about $4 per line; others will see less and some will see \u201ca little bit\u201d more, he said. \u201cA very big portion of these people will have no price increase,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone will be notified of their exact situation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Customers who get a text message notifying them that their plan is being retired will receive a link to click through to get more details.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to be important for a customer when they get the message to click through so they can see their exact situation,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat I can say with absolute certainty is 100 percent of the audience is going to get more benefit, more network capability.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
But wait a minute. What about T-Mobile\u2019s promises of a \u201cprice lock\u201d on certain plans? That seems to have been thrown out the window here.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of been a T-Mobile thing that only you can change your rate plan, that we want you to stay on your rate plan as long as you enjoy your rate plan,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we’re getting to an age where some of these plans literally are 15 years old and they’re very restricted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like it or not, everyone is getting moved to one of the newer rate plans. T-Mobile advertises four price plans on its website ranging from $170\/month to $90\/month (plus taxes and fees) for three phone lines. For a single line, prices range from $100\/month to $50\/month.<\/p>\n
Some customers might assume that because they have a 5G phone, they\u2019re getting the best 5G service from T-Mobile. However, if that phone is on a 10-year-old rate plan, they\u2019re not getting the benefits.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The majority of these customers will get a better video streaming experience than their old plan, whether it\u2019s Netflix, Hulu or Apple, and they\u2019re going to see increased international capabilities, such as free calling in Canada and Mexico or in 200 countries around the world, according to Samson. Hotspot allotments also will increase. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Not going back\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fierce asked how they\u2019re going to handle customers who are angry they\u2019re getting bumped from their old plans.<\/p>\n
The hope is they\u2019ll come around to see the benefits outweigh the additional cost. If that doesn\u2019t work, customers can talk to staff at T-Mobile\u2019s call centers, Samson said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Either way, there\u2019s no going back. \u201cWe are retiring the plans. There\u2019s no going back to the old plans, so that\u2019s not going to be an option that\u2019s available. If they end up in a plan that they don’t want to be in and we have other modern plans we can move them to, we’ll be happy to have that conversation with the customer as well,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But \u201c100% of the folks affected are going to get more. They’re going to get more network experience, they’re going to get more benefits, so, we hope, this is a way to say, look, we hear you on that, we know you like your old plan. We want you to get the very best of it, and this allows us to unlock our network and give all of those best features to you,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cleaning up codes\u00a0<\/p>\n
From a product catalog perspective, T-Mobile has about 1,100 different product and rate plan codes that exist in its billing systems. These are not 1,100 different price plans; they\u2019re codes in the billing system that tell the network what to allow and not allow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With this change, that means all those codes will be whittled down to less than 100, simplifying the back-end stuff. That\u2019s important because every time T-Mobile comes out with a new feature or capability on its website or T-Life app, it has to run it through all these codes to make sure it\u2019s backwards compatible.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt really slows down the rate of innovation and the rate of new things that we can bring to the market,\u201d he said. \u201cDoing this migration will dramatically simplify that work and speed up our introduction of new plans and new experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
T-Mobile: Plenty of capacity\u00a0<\/p>\n
From a network perspective, some customers are sitting on 3G-like plans when T-Mobile and the rest of the industry are talking about 6G. This gets them closer to being able to see the benefits of future innovations, including those related to AI and AI RAN, said Ankur Kapoor, chief network officer at T-Mobile.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s confident that T-Mobile has the spectrum and capacity to provide every customer with a better service.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a lot of capacity,\u201d with fixed wireless access (FWA) being a great example of that, he said.<\/p>\n
T-Mobile\u2019s now serving close to 9 million customers with FWA, which uses excess capacity to deliver internet services to homes, and it\u2019s well on its way to meeting its goal of 15 million FWA customers by 2030.\u00a0<\/p>\n
More 5G Advanced features are coming. \u201cThat’s the most exciting piece for me, that customers get to really use this network without any kind of artificial restrictions that we’ve put on them,\u201d Kapoor said. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Customers on 3G or 4G-era price plans are getting moved to T-Mobile\u2019s newer rate plans whether they like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516563,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[236647,236648,8095,11225,5129,85,46,62550,49632,14184,125,47098,17938],"class_list":["post-516562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-3g","tag-4g-lte","tag-5g","tag-customer-service","tag-fierce-network-homepage","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-price-competition","tag-price-hike","tag-t-mobile","tag-technology","tag-video-streaming","tag-wireless"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516562\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}