T-Mobile’s 5G home broadband now comes with more help for smart-home devices but adjusts how it advertises pricing.
The carrier announced the first change but not the second one in a press release, extending the All-In plan’s 24-hour tech support for connected gadgets like door locks and thermostats to new subscribers who sign up for its cheaper Amplified plan. All-In costs $70 after an auto-pay discount ($55 if you have a T-Mobile voice line) while those rates for Amplified are $10 less.
However, these advertised rates for both plans as well as the cheaper Rely plan ($50 after auto-pay, $35 with a T-Mobile voice line) no longer fold in taxes and fees as they had since T-Mobile launched its 5G home service in 2021.
“We updated our broadband plans to no longer include taxes and fees in the pricing to align with what we’ve done across our broader portfolios and make it easier to compare value across providers,” emailed Shante Newman, a T-Mobile spokesperson. “There’s no change for existing customers who have taxes and fees included on their plans.”
T-Mobile ended its previous practice of including taxes and fees on wireless plans in April, when it introduced new, more expensive Experience plans.
T-Mobile continues to offer a five-year rate lock on its home broadband plans, but an Internet Archive copy of its page listing them as seen in July confirms that this price guarantee only covered base rates: “exclusions like taxes & fees apply.”
The FCC-mandated broadband labels for T-Mobile’s home broadband reveal that new subscribers will pay a “Regulatory programs / Telco recovery fee” of $1.40 plus government taxes that will vary by location. Texas subscribers will also get dinged for a separate “Recovery Fee” of 0.749% of their rate.
(Telecom lobbyists lobbied the FCC in 2023 to allow them to gloss over some of these fine-print fees in their labels; the commission turned them down.)
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All three of T-Mobile’s home 5G offerings continue to include equipment costs and still don’t require contracts. Rely comes with a slightly slower range of download speeds (87 to 318Mbps, versus All-In’s 133 to 415Mbps); Amplified adds “Advanced Cyber Security” based on Cujo AI’s platform as well as the 24/7 connected-device support; All-In throws in a mesh Wi-Fi system and the ads-included versions of Hulu and Paramount+.
T-Mobile also offers small-business versions of these plans under the same names and at the same rates, and new subscribers to the small-biz Amplified and All-In plans also get the Advanced Cyber Security package.
Fixed-wireless broadband has become one of T-Mobile’s bigger successes in recent years, winning over millions of customers from cable internet services and earning high marks in third-party customer-satisfaction surveys as well as PCMag’s Readers’ Choice awards. In its most recent quarterly earnings, released July 23, T-Mobile reported a net increase of 454,000 5G broadband customers, bringing the total to 7.3 million.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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