“It seems like every other week we’re writing about T-Mobile’s attempts to garner attention via, shall we say, nonstandard PR. Usually, it comes in the form of Twitter hijinks from its bombastic CEO, John Legere,” Dieter Bohn reports for The Verge.
“It’s trolling, basically. You set the terms of the debate and make enough noise to draw somebody in,” Bohn reports. “To get a response from Verizon, T-Mobile took its trolling off Twitter and into the real world — into the airspace over Verizon’s headquarters, to be exact. T-Mobile sent a skywriting plane to fly over Basking Ridge, NJ and write the words ‘End overages now’ in the sky.”
“See, back in April of 2014 T-Mobile made the switch to stop charging overage fees for data, opting instead to throttle users that go over their plan to lower data speeds. It would like other carriers to do the same — or rather, it would very much like you to know that other carriers charge overage fees. But question of whether T-Mobile is genuinely trying to get Verizon to change its wireless plans or not is beside the point. What T-Mobile actually wants is a low-stakes Twitter fight with Verizon that will draw attention to T-Mobile,” Bohn reports. “It got it.”
See the photo and all of the tweets here.
MacDailyNews Take: Dumb pipes, regardless of name, we are iPhone users: Kneel before us, proffer deals, and beg for profusely for our much-coveted business.
Ending overages is another way to spell “Unlimited Data Plan”. It’s funny how people say that the industry is walking away from UDP, but T-Mobile is making all of their plans UDP.
What is the difference between, 1GBLTE/UD-2G, 10GBLTE/UD-2G ( a range of T-Mobile plans maxing out on 10GB for everyone – vs – AT&T’s UDP which was 5GBLTE/2G and now 22GBLTE/2G? AT&T calls it unlimited and T-Mobile does not. It’s the same thing, but T-Mobile doesn’t nag you, or make you feel bad when you run out of LTE, and on top of that they don’t count music streaming.
that at&t plan doesn’t exist anymore so the comparison is invalid. You’re comparing plans from two different eras
It doesn’t exist for new customers, but there are plenty of customers who still have it, and AT&T does pay attention to them. Verizon is the only company that added a punishing clause this year. AT&T has been smacked for their past transgressions. If they do anything (ANYTHING) against UDP holders this year, they will get smacked again, even harder. I still thing, no matter how poor T-Mobile’s network coverage is, they are the company to beat on user plans.
It is quite entertaining to observe this pissing match on Twitter!
Why would T-Mobile want a competitor to improve?
The day will come when corporate gateways to the internet will not be needed. The internet will just “be on” and freely accessible to everyone.
I wish you were correct, but the whole purpose of a corporation is to establish by any means possible the fastest extraction of cash from consumers, without any personal liability for the people who are the corporation. Thus, the internet will never be free. Water is also becoming a for-sale-to-highest-bidder commodity, and the air would be if industrial giants had their way.