- T-Mobile is retiring legacy plans whether customers like it or not – and many do not
- The blowback adds to the sense that T-Mobile is acting more like the big carrier it once mocked
- TD Cowen analysts see a possible $288M annual revenue lift, but not a major customer exodus
T-Mobile’s decision to move customers off older rate plans and onto newer, sometimes pricier price plans went over about as expected, which is to say: terrible.
To recap: Just before the July 4 holiday, T-Mobile started informing customers on older 3G and 4G-era rate plans that they were being forced to migrate to newer price plans. T-Mobile tried to frame it as if these customers were going to get better and more advanced services enabled by 5G.
That may well be true, but these customers on older plans – who by definition are loyal T-Mobile clientele – were not happy being told their monthly phone and home internet rates may be going up as much as $6 per line starting on July 13.
Commenters on Reddit debated the merits of flooding customer care with calls, shared purported email addresses of leading company executives at both T-Mobile and parent Deutsche Telekom and threatened class action lawsuits.
How it all shakes out is anyone’s guess. T-Mobile told Fierce last month that these old plans are being retired, hard stop. There’s no going back to the old plans once they’re purged from the systems.
Some customers are taking matters into their own hands. Alex Gerwer, 71, of Long Beach, California, received a notice from T-Mobile on June 26, 2026, that his legacy “Simple Choice” and “Home Internet Plus” plans were getting switched to the “Experience More” and “Home Internet Advanced Plus” plans on July 13.
Moving forward, he was also told he’d get T-Mobile’s “5-Year Price Guarantee.” But he’s got documentation from 2024 showing T-Mobile explicitly promised: “We won’t raise your internet rate. Ever.”
Fierce asked T-Mobile why customers should believe they’re getting a price guarantee when they’re getting rate increases like this, but we didn’t hear back before publication about that or other issues related to the rate plan “modernization,” as they called it.
Update: A T-Mobile spokesperson responded after this story first published and said with regard to the 5-year price guarantee on monthly talk, text and 5G data, "where we’ve committed to not raising prices, those prices are not being adjusted. A large percentage of people will see no price change."
T-Mobile cited in complaints at FCC, etc.
Gerwer filed a notice of dispute with T-Mobile’s legal department in Bellevue, Washington. He also filed complaints with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the California Attorney General, and he's been in touch with the attorneys handling the Oddo v. T-Mobile class action litigation.
He argues that T-Mobile engaged in systemic “bait-and-switch” by promising lifetime price stability to consumers and subsequently forcing them onto higher-priced tiers under the guise of “plan retirement.” The practice is particularly predatory toward senior citizens who rely on the “Price Lock” promise for financial planning, he said.
He’s asking the FCC to compel T-Mobile to honor the “Original Price Lock” agreement specifically authorized for his account in June 2024. He also argues that it’s not merely a “plan update” but a breach of a negotiated contract.
“Basically, what they're saying is yes, we promised you forever, but we're kind of recanting that now by saying that well, if you don't like the fact that we've changed, just go do business elsewhere, which, of course, is an illegal way of dealing with a contractual obligation,” he told Fierce. “What’s clear to me is there was a contractual obligation that was stated in many venues, both in their advertising as well as contractually. I take contracts very seriously.”
Fierce reached out to the FCC for comment and did not hear back before publication.
T-Mobile’s contractual obligations
Gerwer isn’t exactly a newbie to wireless. He spent part of his career leading healthcare market verticals at Siemens back in the day and said he ran the first healthcare demo at CTIA in 2005. That’s around the time he was working with Bill Owens, a friend and colleague with whom he consulted when Owens was CEO at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
That knowledge of how telco back-end systems work is helping as he navigates the proper channels of communication about his beef with T-Mobile, which he said is “betting on customer inertia” as it engineers the latest price hikes.
His experience is reminiscent of his interactions with the cable industry, where he was once guaranteed a $40/month internet service that “literally went up to $100 over the course of three years,” he said. “If you look at cable, they all do it … The next thing you know, you’re paying five times as much.”
While anyone can do simple math to see how much their bill will increase, Gerwer said it’s not that straightforward in his case. For example, what’s the cumulative effect of the increases in phone and internet service over 10 years?
“There’s no guarantee they won’t continue to escalate it. What is the impact? Nobody really knows,” he said.
Analysts: No notable churn foreseen
In a report for investors last week, analysts at TD Cowen noted “unsubstantiated media reports” from The Mobile Report last month suggesting that T-Mobile would be migrating 8 million customers off its oldest legacy plans and onto its lead plans. Of those, about half would experience no price increase at all and the remaining 4 million will see up to a $6/month price increase, based on the report.
“We do not expect a notable churn bubble given the $6 hike is lower than the AT&T and Verizon front book offers. If we run the quick math, this implies a $288 million/year annual lift in mobile service revenue,” the TD Cowen analysts said.
All of this continues a string of recent moves, such as fee increases and price hikes, that make T-Mobile seem “very ‘carrier’ like as its maverick status continually decreases as it becomes the largest telco in the world and can leverage its best network/price/experience” to is competitive advantage, the analysts concluded.
Circling back to Gerwer, he said the FCC officially served his complaint to T-Mobile on July 1 and the company is now under a 30-day federal mandate to provide a formal written defense of its actions by July 31.
As of early Tuesday, July 14, his online portal still showed his legacy “Simple Choice” and “Home Internet Plus” plans. He’s monitoring it daily to see if it’s just a billing cycle delay, an IT rollout lag or maybe his FCC/regulatory complaints successfully forced a “freeze” on his account migration.
“I’m really putting the pedal to this because I find this so reprehensible,” he said. “We have to hold people like the leaders of T-Mobile accountable because otherwise they will ride roughshod over consumers.”
More content about T-Mobile:
T-Mobile says older-plan customers need 5G refresh
What happened to T-Mobile's ‘un-carrier’ edge?
T-Mobile says new 5-year price 'guarantee' is for reals