- Customers on 3G or 4G-era price plans are getting moved to T-Mobile’s newer rate plans whether they like it or not
- It’s all about providing everyone with a better 5G experience, according to T-Mobile CMO Allan Samson
- Some customers will see price increases of $4 per line, but T-Mobile says a “very big portion” won’t see any increase
Some T-Mobile customers are being notified today that they’re getting moved to newer, sometimes pricier, rate plans.
Basically, a lot of customers are on plans so old that they can’t experience the full greatness of T-Mobile’s current 5G and 5G Advanced network. At least, that’s how they’re justifying the switch.
“We think ultimately it will improve their experience with us,” T-Mobile Chief Marketing Officer Allan Samson told Fierce.
A segment of customers will see a price increase of about $4 per line; others will see less and some will see “a little bit” more, he said. “A very big portion of these people will have no price increase,” he said. “Everyone will be notified of their exact situation.”
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.
“It’s going to be important for a customer when they get the message to click through so they can see their exact situation,” he said. “What I can say with absolute certainty is 100 percent of the audience is going to get more benefit, more network capability.”
But wait a minute. What about T-Mobile’s promises of a “price lock” on certain plans? That seems to have been thrown out the window here.
“It’s 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,” he said. “But we're getting to an age where some of these plans literally are 15 years old and they're very restricted.”
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.
Some customers might assume that because they have a 5G phone, they’re getting the best 5G service from T-Mobile. However, if that phone is on a 10-year-old rate plan, they’re not getting the benefits.
The majority of these customers will get a better video streaming experience than their old plan, whether it’s Netflix, Hulu or Apple, and they’re 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.
Not going back
Fierce asked how they’re going to handle customers who are angry they’re getting bumped from their old plans.
The hope is they’ll come around to see the benefits outweigh the additional cost. If that doesn’t work, customers can talk to staff at T-Mobile’s call centers, Samson said.
Either way, there’s no going back. “We are retiring the plans. There’s no going back to the old plans, so that’s not going to be an option that’s 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,” he said.
But “100% 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,” he said.
Cleaning up codes
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’re codes in the billing system that tell the network what to allow and not allow.
With this change, that means all those codes will be whittled down to less than 100, simplifying the back-end stuff. That’s 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’s backwards compatible.
“It really slows down the rate of innovation and the rate of new things that we can bring to the market,” he said. “Doing this migration will dramatically simplify that work and speed up our introduction of new plans and new experiences.”
T-Mobile: Plenty of capacity
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.
He’s confident that T-Mobile has the spectrum and capacity to provide every customer with a better service.
“We have a lot of capacity,” with fixed wireless access (FWA) being a great example of that, he said.
T-Mobile’s now serving close to 9 million customers with FWA, which uses excess capacity to deliver internet services to homes, and it’s well on its way to meeting its goal of 15 million FWA customers by 2030.
More 5G Advanced features are coming. “That'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,” Kapoor said.