Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
T-Mobile to Simplify Phone Bills With Single Unlimited Data Plan and No Additional Fees
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Wow, excellent! I like our phone networks in the UK but there's no real push forward. I was excited to get an o2 contract with 20gb data, unlimited calls+texts for £18/mo. Would love to get unlimited data for that price too. Imagine being able to update apps over the air without any worry, and tick the "high quality" music button on Apple Music... and not worry again.
[doublepost=1483659601][/doublepost]
[doublepost=1483659601][/doublepost]
Is that standard? That seems incredibly expensive, that's like £33 here but you get 20gb of data instead of 3.
I use Skype on the free data plan and it works fine. No need to use call minutes. I don't get calls but could use Skype in or other VOIP if I needed that.
The water (or data) may be infinite for practical purposes but the pipe (radio channel) used to deliver it has a finite gal/min (or MB/s). People are using the terms data, data rate and channel capacity interchangeably in this discussion. They are separate concepts with distinct meanings. Wikipedia people...
When this plan first came out, there was not corporate discount or I would have switched. I as am still playing less on my simple choice north American plan.
I think the $160 already includes the autopay.
[doublepost=1483660442][/doublepost]
from t-mobile
What is KickBack?
- Some months, some customers need less data. Now, T-Mobile will actually pay you back up to $10 per line (up to $120) when you use 2 GB of data or less in a month and pay your bill on time.
- KickBack works on any voice or tablet line
Venusboy:
Free introduced those cheap plans 6 years ago in France
They used other carriers infrastructure by the way (Orange's) and then slowly deployed theirs.
Since then all carries aligned to those prices.
Tmobile is very similar to Free in the sense they drive the others to change.
(Free tried to acquire Tmobile btw, 2 years ago
https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/free-frances-t-mobile-wants-to-acquire-t-mobile-for-15-billion/
)
Now, if you want to hurt yourself, compare also prices for Internet ....
On the bright side, check gas price here in the US and in France
(A french guy living in Arizona)
DDoS attack on what, the ISP? Not sure what that analogy is supposed to mean. I still don't buy that the finiteness of water is analogous to the finiteness of the internet.
Not really, I think it would be very easily shown that the average data usage of today is dramatically higher than the average data usage of 20 years ago. The increase in technology has allowed us to consume more data, and stated in that article "The cost of increasing [broadband] capacity has declined much faster than the increase in data traffic," says Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic, an independent ISP based in Santa Rosa, Calif." I don't know that this increase in usage is the case for water (it could be, at which point I'll reconsider).
I think of it this way - what does my ISP really provide for me? They upkeep the infrastructure, and they provide me a connection to some larger internet system. Isn't that the same thing my electric company provides - infrastructure upkeep and connection to a larger power grid? Isn't that the same thing my water company provides - infrastructure upkeep and connection to a larger water reservoir? My ISP doesn't actually make any of the data I consume - Netflix and MacRumors forum members make the data
Yes, there are differences. None of the differences change the fact that I think economically, we would be better if ISPs were treated like utilities and if ISPs charged us by unit of use.
Once again, I don't believe this is an accurate representation of how the internet works. In general, Netflix is going to have their own infrastructure and servers placed at your ISP, and your ISP is going to serve from those servers directly to you.
Furthermore, Google and other internet companies themselves have been known to purchase the backbone links of the internet, for instance:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/google-new-brazil-us-internet-cable
http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/google-facebook-fiber-optic-cable-pacific-ocean-120tbps/
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/google-turns-giant-internet-cable/
My sense of this is that Google and other companies lay fiber, reserve portions of it for their own traffic, place servers at local ISPs that are fed from these networks, and the local ISPs provide you the last link between your home. Please explain to me why the 300 gigs of Netflix I stream is on a per byte cost to the ISP (and a fixed monthly fee to Netflix)
[doublepost=1483661426][/doublepost]
While what you say is technically accurate, it is also misleading. Speeds will continue to increase for the foreseeable future, with complex use of multiple networks, for instance high frequency networks for small areas (e.g., 5G has been tested at 15GHz, 58GHZ, local wifi networks are usable at 60GHZ) that will quickly switch you around. These are technical hurdles being solved
Last edited:
The $70 plan only has 480p video streaming and 3G tethering, so it's included, but limited. However the One Plus plan includes HD video streaming and 4G prioritized tethering.
Edit:
Actually, The One Plus International is the only one that includes both 4G tethering + HD video streaming. That's +$25. The One Plus (+$15) only includes HD video streaming.
Last edited:
I don't get why everybody seams happy about paying $70 a month for athat. Sure it's certainly cheaper than other carriers but it's still a ripoff! And who needs unlimited call or texts?? Data is all that matter and video quality is restricted unless you pay a premium. Oh and you still have to pay for the phone itself... WTF serioulsy?
Whatever man. You seem to be picking nits that are totally not pertinent to the main argument, which is that charging by unit used is the superior way to pay, for the best interest of the consumer. Of course ISP trade groups have done a lot of marketing to convince everyone otherwise, and to ensure we do not regulate them as a utility.
I love T-mo but their infrastructure isn't keeping up with this growth. Over the past few years I've noticed service improve a lot but lately it has become far less reliable. I drop calls more often and even get the "all circuit are busy" type of message. That's kind of weird in this day and age.
These new plans will make matters worse. I hope T-mo is working on this...
These new plans will make matters worse. I hope T-mo is working on this...
Wow. Someone with common sense and basic reasoning ability. You don't see that every day on macrumors.
In theory they can throttle you when you go that far over and the towers have to be congested. I've never found one in the Twin Cities that is, or in my travels. In truth most towers around the country aren't, other than a few in very large metros.
If the main argument is that paying per byte is superior, please know that I don't agree.
You may be right in terms of pure economic efficiency, but there are other aspects. The Internet invites to browse and explore, follow links, perhaps watch a few news videos etc., and more recently to discover and consume various types of media. If you knew that every web page, every video and every song costs additional money, you'd feel constricted (I know I did back in the dial-up days before we had flat rates). It's a bit like pricing books by the number of pages, or pay for TV by hours watched (though in the latter case the discouragement might be healthy
).
Images/etc are compressed to reduce page load times. End users would still want fast page loads even if they had unlimited bandwidth available to them.
If users had unlimited bandwidth, the images would load instantly no matter what the file sizes were.
[doublepost=1483670029][/doublepost]
You may be right in terms of pure economic efficiency, but there are other aspects. The Internet invites to browse and explore, follow links, perhaps watch a few news videos etc., and more recently to discover and consume various types of media. If you knew that every web page, every video and every song costs additional money, you'd feel constricted (I know I did back in the dial-up days before we had flat rates). It's a bit like pricing books by the number of pages, or pay for TV by hours watched (though in the latter case the discouragement might be healthy
But don't you see, your other examples are spot on. We do pay for books by the unit consumed - per book. If it was like the internet, you would pay per month for "unlimited books, not to exceed 30 books per month, at which point you will be limited to 5 pages per day."
And if every video and every song did cost additional money, you see that as an extra cost but I see it as just plain usage with the option of saving money. I don't think about how much water I'm using when I shower - I just shower until I'm clean and feel good. At the end of the month I pay the bill. If I want to save money, I can choose to shower less, but I don't worry about it ever. Same with electricity. If It's hot out, I run the A/C and pay the bill at the end of the month for the energy I used. If I want to save some money, I'll choose to open a window instead. The same should be with the internet. You use what you use and pay the bill. If you want to save, choose to not click on your crazy uncle's chain email youtube link.
Do you have unlimited voice on your phone or is that still charged by the minute? Like 1986.
This.
What T-Mobile has attempted to communicate is that its network capacity is advanced enough to handle the amount of Internet traffic they expect from the majority of users being on an unlimited data plan.
By-the-minute and By-the-megabyte plans initially existed I believe to keep traffic down to manageable levels. Today, voice network capacity is great enough that nobody cares if people yak a lot at any time of day on their phones. SMS charges back in the day were a pure money grab, since the messages required extremely tiny network resources.
The analogy doesn't really fit. The unit of reading consumption is words or pages. You may find War and Peace for a lower price than some Batman comic, so per-book pricing does not necessarily create an incentive to read less.
Good for you, but there is such a thing as psychology. I hated the Internet without flat rates, because I always felt rushed. I much prefer to know in advance what I'm going to pay without constantly monitoring my consumption.
Every other week they have the new best thing ever. Gimmicks. Just give me a fair price for a good service. Enough with the blockbuster changes every month. Everything here should have been done a long time ago, and the crap they want to do in 3 months should be done now.
EDIT: Yeah, at $70.00 mo. to start, I won't be signing up with T-Mobile anytime soon... I'm loving my Pixel though with Project Fi.
EDIT: Yeah, at $70.00 mo. to start, I won't be signing up with T-Mobile anytime soon... I'm loving my Pixel though with Project Fi.