T-Mobile Unveils New 'Data Stash' Program That Allows Unused Data to Roll Over Each Month

[wigby]

Not lately. They've been bending over backwards to try and slow T-Mobile down.

It's easy to be the fastest growing when you're the smallest. Just ask Windows phone. No one is scared of them either.

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AT&T has definitely been responding to T-Mobile for the past 4-6 quarters. NEXT, double data promotions, Wi-Fi Calling, Price drops, lower margins (for AT&T), the Cricket acquisition, are all responses to T-Mobile. They've shown that they would rather accept lower profits by lowering prices than keep allowing T-Mobile to take customers from them.

Verizon then in turn responds to AT&T.

Or you can say that ATT is just responding to Verizon.

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It seems like AT&T responds to T-Mobile and Verizon responds to AT&T.

You can't say they only respond to each other or we wouldn't have the promotions we have right now.

Yes you can. Verizon just added more data for free. They do that to steal customers away from ATT. So ATT does the same back to Verizon.

What you suggest is like Apple and Google targeting Windows Phone customers. Why would they?

 

[mnsportsgeek]

It's easy to be the fastest growing when you're the smallest. Just ask Windows phone. No one is scared of them either.

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Or you can say that ATT is just responding to Verizon.

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Yes you can. Verizon just added more data for free. They do that to steal customers away from ATT. So ATT does the same back to Verizon.



What you suggest is like Apple and Google targeting Windows Phone customers. Why would they?

Huh? Are you really trying to make the argument that T-Mobile didn't influence Sprint and AT&T's double data promotion?

 

[StrongArmmed]

If only their network were stronger, I'd switch my five lines to T-Mobile tomorrow...

 

[SoAnyway]

If only their network were stronger, I'd switch my five lines to T-Mobile tomorrow...

Stronger where you live of course. T-Mobile is great where I am and the places I travel to.

 

[tuna9720]

What if T-Mobile switches the plans automatically if you don't use the data that you purchased and gives you a refund.. That would be more awesome

 

[AlecZ]

That data is rightfully yours

Um, no, the contract with AT&T we agreed on and signed says that it doesn't roll over, so it's not rightfully mine. Of course, I'd like it to be, but T-Mobile sucks here. Hopefully AT&T follows.

My only complaint is that AT&T once said that I had used 99% of my data and that my plan would reset "tomorrow," so I went into airplane mode. The next day at noon, I loaded a webpage and immediately got an SMS from AT&T saying that I had just gone over. WTF?

 

[flash84x]

This is a no-brainer because it won't put any additional stress on their network. Until I switched plans at ATT last week my wife and I had an old family plan with 1400 minutes. We rarely used them all and regularly had between 3,000 and 4,000 minutes rolled over. Did that cause us to somehow panic and decide that we needed to make a bunch of calls, nope! People's data usage habits are just that, habits. It's highly unlikely that someone or some family who regularly use less than all their data and then have it rolled over will run out towards the end of 12 months and suddenly use it all. Sure it's handy to have if you go on vacation somewhere where there isn't wifi and suddenly your usage pattern changes for a week or two but my guess is this is a great marketing move with little overall impact to their network. Nice job T-Mobile!

Exactly. My reaction to this news was "that's all?". This is a super awesome thing for them to do but your habits are your habits. This is mostly a marketing ploy and benefit that will help people out here and there but it's not going to help heavy data users that reach their quota each month.

 

[ttss6]

AT&T was my past (horrible experience), Verizon is my present (meh, still in contract), and T-Mobile looks to be in my future!

 

[JackieInCo]

If only their network were stronger, I'd switch my five lines to T-Mobile tomorrow...

It's excellent here in Broomfield Colorado. I could never get LTE on AT&T and Verizon. Only T-Mobile seems to be able to do that.

 

[nouveau-apple]

In terms of policy and attitude, absolutely. In terms of coverage, unfortunately not, and that's still the trump card for Verizon and at&t.

Not for long hopefully

 

[nilk]

Wait - do they not do this anymore? I upgraded to the 6+, from the iPhone 4 a few weeks ago (this 6+ is a great phone, it makes my iPhone 4 look like a toy) and I looked into the new pricing schemes from ATT. It makes no sense to get of these legacy plans. It seems like eventually they will just force us off the plans.

I pay $89 bucks for 450 rollover minutes, unlimited text and data. I think I have like 4,000 minutes and this month I am at like 9 gigs of data. I travel a lot for work so I listen to podcasts and streaming music and I have never experienced any throttling of the data. I guess it is jerks like me that ruins it for everyone

I think all the current AT&T plans have unlimited minutes. Limited minutes for voice calls seems to be disappearing from the industry.

I had the old unlimited data plan, and might have kept it if I could do legit tethering with it. The other factor is the old plans are more expensive for my use case (I've never used more than 2GB data in a month, most of the time it's less than 1GB).

T-Mobile's unlimited plan is attractive to me until I realize it has a tethering limit at 5GB. The plan is still pretty generous, but the only way I'd need unlimited is if I tethered a lot, so it wouldn't make sense for me because it would basically be a 6GB plan for me. I'd rather pay AT&T more if I needed additional tethering data and have better coverage. I say AT&T has better coverage because my wife is on T-Mobile and I consistently have better service than her even when we travel a few times a year (she's considering switching to AT&T). I'm sure there are some markets where T-Mobile has better coverage.

 

[31 Flavas]

It's nice to see T-Mobile USA pushing so many different ideas - really shaking things up in the rather uncompetitive US telecoms market, but I'm not sure that this makes sense.

If anything, it just weakens the arguments for having metered internet connections.

I think that actually is the argument. T-Mobile's CEO wants to put the screws to AT&T and Verizon. The 300 meg data 'tier' is an insidious trap. It's small enough that you can easily blow through it and trigger a data overage charge. But, even more so, the data overage charge is in 300 meg blocks. So you get hit with multiple charges vs a single charge in other tiers. Oh and don't think you get a proportional "discount" since you are charged in 300 meg blocks. You are charge more.

Data overage is $20 per 300 meg vs $15 per 1GB in the other data tiers.

So if you try to save money per month by going with the 'cheaper' 300 meg data plan. But in one particular month end up using a total of 1GB of data; That's three $20 overage charges -- $60 for 900 meg. Where you'd be given one $15 data overage charge for a whole gig of data in the others.

As such, they're leveraging data overage charges to get you to spend more per month on data that you likely otherwise would not need. But, but are buying just so you don't get hit with retardo data overage fees. The effect of which is you are still paying the data overage fee every month.

 

[alphaod]

I thought T-Mobile had unlimited data… or they don't now?

 

[BeSweeet]

I thought T-Mobile had unlimited data… or they don't now?

Everything's unlimited on T-Mobile as they have been for years. The "caps" that you see are regarding how much data you get before you're throttled to 128Kbps speeds. Only their +$30 ($80/mo.) plan offers unthrottled unlimited data.

 

[31 Flavas]

I thought T-Mobile had unlimited data… or they don't now?

They do have unlimited data. The effect here is you won't have to pay for unlimited data if you don't *actually* need unlimited data, in a month.

Or to put it another way: If your data usage wobbles per month -- and you are paying extra for more data, just in case -- Then you likely can now choose a lower data allotment.

For example, if you are paying for 3 gig of data a month because, *some times*, you use more then 1 gig a month. You can very likely skip the 3 gig plan because you can use data that you didn't use last month (or for the past 12 months).

Also, as I said above it will really stick a screw in AT&T and Verizon and their horrible 300 meg "trap" data plans. And the T-Mo CEO loves to stick screws to both of them.

And, as always, even if you do exceed both your T-Mo plan data and your excess unused data from previous months -- You *still* will not be charged anything extra. Because all metered T-mobile Simple Choice plans included unlimited 2G data.

 

[macfoxpro]

He pretty much just said for the people in the suburbs to move out, and back to the city if they want good coverage. Sorry, John, I like you but your coverage is ****** at best. If I could say the F word, I ****ing would right now.

 

[bchreng]

Looks like it doesn't apply to the free data plan on my HP Chromebook. Might consider shelling out for the 1GB/mo. plan. This will definitely be a game changer. I can see ATT adopting this, while simultaneously lowering the data cap before throttling.

 

[2457282]

I applaud it.

T-Mobile is where it's at right now.

It's the best carrier right now.

I agree with your first two lines. However, no matter what the CEO said in the interview, the quality of the service is not the best right now. In chicago it is pretty bad and in DC it is behind the others. It is in only a few select places like New York where it has good service and performance. If they ramp that up fast, maybe, but not just yet. And since I travel between these three places, TM is not a service I can use today. Maybe someday.

 

[31 Flavas]

He pretty much just said for the people in the suburbs to move out, and back to the city if they want good coverage. Sorry, John, I like you but your coverage is ****** at best. If I could say the F word, I ****ing would right now.

Really? To me the T-Mo CEO just said, "Hey, come get your service from us. We won't have you choose a higher data package if you don't actually need it. You can use unused data from previous months to cover excess use on another. And even if you exceed your current months data and exceed all your previous unused data -- we still won't charge you anything extra like AT&T or Verizon would." Moreover, because we're picking up so many new customer because we aren't screwing them over -- we're expanding LTE and Wideband coverage all the time.

 

[BeSweeet]

I agree with your first two lines. However, no matter what the CEO said in the interview, the quality of the service is not the best right now. In chicago it is pretty bad and in DC it is behind the others. It is in only a few select places like New York where it has good service and performance. If they ramp that up fast, maybe, but not just yet. And since I travel between these three places, TM is not a service I can use today. Maybe someday.

Only a few select places? Okay...

 

[macfoxpro]

I've been with T-Mo since forever, in part because I like it that the parent company is not US based and in part because the customer service has always been miles better than the competition (I have had AT&T and Sprint and people close to me have those, and also Verizon, so I have a decent sample size), and in part because for whatever reason my life has not put me in places T-Mo or T-Mo roaming didn't work for me over those years (I live in a big east coast city). I even suffered through the years with no iPhone just because I liked the customer experience so much. Now I postpay a plan with like 5 lines on it (a kid, a wife, a mom, and two for me) and am mathematically certain I am getting by far the best deal for what I need from a carrier with the SimpleChoice plan terms -- and we're all rocking iPhones in the same big city to be sure. I have had some issues with both customer service and coverage in the last couple of years, but in town my iPhone is blazing fast over 4G LTE and now it will shortly be wideband, so there's that. I can't even picture it being faster, it's equivalent to the fast wifi at my company. And it works underground and in my office building pretty good too, at least as well as my colleagues' phones do.

So this sounds like a testimonial, but in fact everything Legere has done with uncarrier stuff has been to my definite financial and lifestyle advantage. I drive a lot and stream hours of music in my car off the books with the free music streaming service. I travel internationally a lot and love the free data roaming in Europe and Latin America. I can always get a human being in 10 minutes or less with a problem. The website billing and account pages are transparent and easy for me to figure out even with all those lines. I call and tweak my plan regularly based on usage patterns of the various lines. I use my phone for a hotspot all over town and when traveling and it's been pretty flawless and reasonably snappy, and means I don't have to have data plans on my tablet or laptop.

So far, I can't see why Verizon and AT&T aren't in fact pooping in their pants, as Legere says. He's kind of a jerk and he tries a little too hard to be hip in press events, but I'm starting to buy into the argument that he is pretty damn smart.

So yeah, this is something I'll use and appreciate and thanks T-Mobile.

Thanks, John

 

[31 Flavas]

Looks like it doesn't apply to the free data plan on my HP Chromebook. Might consider shelling out for the 1GB/mo. plan. This will definitely be a game changer. I can see ATT adopting this, while simultaneously lowering the data cap before throttling.

AT&T and Verizon will never eliminate data overage charges. Hell will have frozen over when they do. AT&T only throttles their legacy unlimited data plan customers because they hate them and want them to choose a different plan.

 

[macfoxpro]

Really? To me the T-Mo CEO just said, "Hey, come get your service from us. We won't have you choose a higher data package if you don't actually need it. You can use unused data from previous months to cover excess use on another. And even if you exceed your current months data and exceed all your previous unused data -- we still won't charge you anything extra like AT&T or Verizon would." Moreover, because we're picking up so many new customer because we aren't screwing them over -- we're expanding LTE and Wideband coverage all the time.

"Data Rollover" "Data Stash" "Higher Data Package" all means nothing when the coverage is that horrible. I had T-Mobile for about 2 months (last spring) and it was useless to me...not even kinda good. It was terrible.

 

[jcmeyer5]

Yeah... not that excited for a couple reasons: A) it is T-Mobile, and B) it is T-Mobile. If they actually had a network built out nationally, then maybe this would be a threat... or at least interesting. As it is though... *yawn*

Edit: What macfoxpro said

 

[chrisbru]

If TMobile was anywhere near as good for data speeds and voice coverage as Verizon where I live, I'd switch in a heartbeat. Hopefully in another year or so that will be the case.