As a US resident temporarily living in Europe, that’s still crazy. A SIM-only plan that costs $75/mo in the US on T-Mobile is about $20/mo or less in the EU.
I wish they’d stop going for “greater value” and instead just offer lower prices.
It’s not an effective way to compete in the US, where most subscribers live outside city limits and coverage is king. (That’s why Verizon is #1 even though it’s the most expensive.) To put things into perspective, the Munich metro area is about the same population as DC’s, but twelve times as dense. Wiring up the urban areas hits almost all your potential subscribers in Munich. (Last time I went, the area between the airport and the city was countryside and had no LTE. The fastest growing part of the DC Metro area is an exurb close to the airport, an hour outside the city.) T-Mo has struggled with LTE coverage outside the cities. At the same time it’s expensive to build cell towers all through the suburbs and exurbs. So the winning play is not necessarily doubling down on the cities and pushing down cost. Americans are willing to pay for coverage (and on the flip side, will punish you in the market for not pursuing coverage).
What’s the Data cap? I bought a Vodafone sim in Europe and it was €20 for 1GB. There were people outside complaining they turned their phone on and hit the data cap within a couple minutes. The 1GB barely lasted a day using google maps to find my way around and that was after I turned off a lot of apps like email and such.
You're doing something very wrong. I spent 9 days in Scotland and used less than 8GB of data from a Vodafone SIM I picked up for a similar price. My phone was in hotspot mode then entire time sharing the data with 3 others phones and a couple tablets.
Also if you're using Google Maps then I strongly consider you cache offline map data as it will dramatically reduce your data consumption as it's updated via Wifi automatically.
* It occurs to me that you might have been using Satellite view. Don't that's a huge waste of data. The traditional maps view is vector data (i.e. tiny) where as satellite photography consumes a lot of data.
There were people outside complaining they turned their phone on and hit the data cap within a couple minutes.
Not one of them wondered what the hell their phone is doing to continuously max out the modem's bandwidth until the data runs out? Regardless, I don't use the work WiFi, stream music a lot of the day, and it still takes a week or two to burn 1GB. IOW, something doesn't sound quite right, like they shorted you on the data?
I wish they’d stop going for “greater value” and instead just offer lower prices.