
How T-Mobile wanted to change itself but ended up changing the wireless industry - jseliger
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2015/12/how-bellevues-t-mobile-changed-the-industry.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bizj_seattle+%28Seattle+-+Puget+Sound+Business+Journal%29
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shortformblog
The real trump card, out of T-Mobile's many offerings, is the free
international roaming for texting and data usage. No other U.S. carrier offers
anything nearly as good on that front. To compare:

T-Mobile: [http://www.t-mobile.com/optional-
services/roaming.html](http://www.t-mobile.com/optional-services/roaming.html)
(Free texting, free 2G data in 140 countries, calls 20 cents per minute, 3G
data available for a fee; covers every continent except Antartica.)

Sprint: [http://www.sprint.com/landings/international-value-
roaming/](http://www.sprint.com/landings/international-value-roaming/) (Gets
closest; free roaming in 64 countries and similar price plan, but there are
significant gaps: it does not cover most of Europe or Asia, and Africa and the
Middle East are notable dead zones)

Verizon: [http://www.verizonwireless.com/landingpages/international-
tr...](http://www.verizonwireless.com/landingpages/international-travel/) ($10
day passes, $25 monthly plan that does not include free texting, calls $1.79 a
minute, only 100 megs of data)

AT&T:
[https://www.att.com/shop/wireless/international/roaming.html](https://www.att.com/shop/wireless/international/roaming.html)
(Cheapest plan $30, only includes 120 megs of data, calls still $1 per minute)

The company took its biggest advantage over every other U.S. carrier—its
affiliation with a large international mobile conglomerate—and leveraged that
into something no other carrier could pull off to the same level of coverage.
A brilliant move on their part.

I now make a point of recommending people switch to T-Mobile before making a
big international trip.

~~~
GavinMcG
Google Fi offers basically the same thing as T-Mobile – free texting, data at
the same rate you pay in the US, voice for 20 cents per minute.

[https://fi.google.com/about/rates/](https://fi.google.com/about/rates/)

~~~
shortformblog
Good to know. I imagine that might be due to the fact it works on T-Mobile and
Sprint networks is probably one reason for that. I looked into Google Fi and
found that I got a better deal through TMo for the amount of data I use, but I
think that's definitely a case of YMMV.

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joneholland
I worked for TMo in the pre-Legere era. About 8 years ago.

The climate was toxic. IT was just a cost center. We had multi year waterfall
death march projects.

I eventually resigned after most of the work was pushed to offshore
contractors, the onshore teams gutted, and those that remain responsible for
rewriting the crap the offshore teams produced.

I ran into a old friend who is still there recently, and I was surprised to
find out that despite the huge public changes under Legere, IT was still a
huge mess with the same leaders pushing most of the work offshore.

~~~
jessaustin
You have my sympathies, but having worked at several, I'd be surprised to find
an American phone company where IT _didn 't_ display those pathologies. The
environment is so dominated by regulation and has been for so long that
executives can't _imagine_ IT being other than a cost center, and honestly I
don't think they're wrong. Telecom profits are pursued through investment,
marketing, and lobbying. Look at all the work Google has done to route around
this industry -- if there were a functioning market in which numerous
providers had to appeal to customers, little of that would have been
necessary.

There is good engineering in telecom, _inside the switches_ , which are
purchased from outside vendors.

~~~
someguydave
All mobile phone providers in the us are more-or-less managed by the US
government indirectly through FCC spectrum auction rules (and operating rules)
and FTC/SEC monopoly regulation.

~~~
jessaustin
You've identified one link in the chain. Why not consider the management of
the FCC by the Daughters Bell via lobbyists and the revolving door? (The SEC
and FTC are captured by different industries.) They all dearly love extant USA
spectrum policy, because they know that without it they would cease to exist
in a few short years. The way to thrive without pleasing customers, is to
write the rules that keep real competition out.

~~~
someguydave
Indeed. There's a kind of 'iron polygon' that is composed of the FCC, media
corps, content corps, telecom corps, cable corps, satellite corps, lobbyists,
Congressional patronage, and federal and state civil servants with agendas.
Each node wields power over and/or shares power with other nodes. Promotion is
from within. The unifying principle of the polygon is to plan the
telecommunications industry in such a fashion that the polygon remains on top.

This 'organization' has no customer service line, and the existing cell-phone
companies essentially work as oligopolistic - and profitable - vassals of the
polygon.

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someguydave
I was a loyal T-Mobile customer for 12 years, until I went to the apple store
and paid full price for a pair of unlocked iphones. After a few weeks I got a
letter from T-Mobile saying that they had taken out a loan in my name to pay
for the phone I had just paid for in full. I never got the whole story about
how this was even possible, but there are clearly very scammy people somewhere
in the management chain at T-Mobile.

I went to Verizon and got more data for less money, and since I had an Iphone
6 it was fully portable to Verizon.

~~~
therein
I think you were too hasty at assuming malicious intentions. Sounds like it
was an honest mistake that the person checking you out made or some sort of
glitch. It could even be related to the data breach they've had through
Experian lately.

~~~
someguydave
And in a related point, they refused to take the loan off of my account until
I went to the apple store and had the manager swear to them that I had paid in
full (even though it's not possible to buy an iphone on 'loan' though
apple/tmobile). When the apple rep who was helping asked the tmobile rep how
it was even possible for this to happen, the tmobile guy told him 'we won't
tell you how this happened' \- didn't sound like an 'honest mistake' to me.

------
mixmastamyk
Indeed, it almost seems like loathing of the customer is no longer considered
a good business plan.

I'm surprised it took this long.

------
allendoerfer
I find it amusing how a company that was owned by a state and had a monopoly
in one of the biggest consumer markets only 20 years ago, is now treated like
an underdog in the US.

In Germany it is the other way around: T-Mobile recently lost the leading
position to Telefonica from Spain, which is called O2 in Germany, after
several mergers.

~~~
ck2
It's an underdog in the US because it doesn't have the infatructure that at&t
and verizon do.

t-mobile is usually the better value but doesn't have the towers and signal
strength

mvnos are changing the value part though, you can get verizon's towers and
signal strength without paying verizon prices, it's just the average consumer
has no clue

~~~
w33ble
Pre-paid plans seemed to have started their lives as a huge ripoff, and I
think they still have that stigma. But MVNOs have made them an amazing value
now, and T-Mobile has helped a ton too. Even buying directly from the other
big three providers, the cost has come way down.

I wasn't aware of any Verizon MVNOs though, it seemed like they all went away
or got bought up. Mind sharing which are available?

~~~
nqzero
i did a survey of low-cost MVNOs over the xmas break, focused on data-centric
plans that cost approximately $10 per month (i use google voice). there's also
a link to the full list on wikipedia, which you can sort by carrier

[http://blog.nqzero.com/2015/12/at-mvno-pay-as-you-go-data-
pl...](http://blog.nqzero.com/2015/12/at-mvno-pay-as-you-go-data-plans.html)

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stcredzero
_Customers traditionally purchased phones with big subsidiaries from wireless
carriers_

Egregious editing for a news organization.

~~~
jessriedel
How should it have been phrased?

~~~
techsupporter
Subsidies, not "subsidiaries." The latter is a business term for an entity
owned by another entity (Skype, A.G. is a subsidiary of Microsoft, for
example).

