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We covered news yesterday about certain rumblings at T-Mobile, specifically how many employees have been told to attend a meeting on Monday morning. We assumed it would be new plans to compete with Verizon.
Unfortunately, we’ve learned a bit of exclusive news about what’s going to happen, and it isn’t the new plan extravaganza we thought it might be.
Forced Plan Migrations
In what can only be described as a company stabbing its long-time customers in the back, T-Mobile is apparently planning to force migrate customers off certain legacy plans.
Specifically, Simple Choice and ONE plan customers will be moved off of their grandfathered plans and onto more modern plans. Apparently, new plans are being created specifically for these customers. Magenta plan customers may also be affected, but it’s unclear right now.
It’s not fully clear exactly which plans will be migrated, but if we had to guess, it would be any plan not covered by the specific price lock that prevents price increases. The chart below explains the different versions of Price Lock and Un-Contract.
In addition, these changes are apparently hitting T-Mobile for Business customers as well.
It’s likely T-Mobile will try and spin the move as “good news” for these customers, possibly touting all the new benefits and perks you’ll get for just a small price increase.
Price Increase Details
T-Mobile will also be increasing the cost of voice lines for these customers by $6 per line. Watch and tablet lines will increase by $3 per line. Customers with 5G Home Internet are also going to get a $6 price bump on those lines.
That would mean, for example, a ONE plan with 5 paid lines could see a $30 price increase. Free lines, presumably, will remain free, and not be subject to the $6 increase.
Then there’s the unique plan perks. The popular Kickback promo, where customers on the ONE plan would get $10 off per line that stayed under 2GB of data use, is also ending.
Using the above example of a ONE plan with 5 paid lines, assuming each one was actively getting that credit, that could result in a price increase of $80 total. Outrageous.
As for the famous insider discount, theoretically that should migrate to the new plan just like it would if you had upgraded manually to a newer plan.
No “New” Plans After All
It turns out our initial guess of new plans was way off. T-Mobile has decided that, instead of making new cheaper plans to compete with Verizon and AT&T (and the number of cheaper MVNO plans), they’ll screw over long-time loyal customers instead.
This move can only be seen as T-Mobile shooting themselves in the foot. Customers barely tolerated the last time price increases hit legacy plans (and some didn’t tolerate it at all), so this time around it’s likely many customers will be shopping around for new cell plans.
It’s truly bewildering why T-Mobile would choose to do this at all, let alone a week after their biggest competitor announced a new super competitive price. It’s almost like they want customers to leave.
The (barely) good news is, apparently, T-Mobile won’t implement these changes for two weeks after announcing them, so you’ll have a little bit of time to decide what to do.
We’ll be publishing a new article in a few hours once all the details are public, so be sure to keep an eye out for that. For now, you might want to look into Verizon’s new Simplicity plan, or shop around for prepaid options instead. For now, though, RIP UnCarrier!
