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T-Mobile made a lot of people angry a few weeks ago with the announcement that most legacy customers were being forced onto newer plans with increased prices.
Since then, there have been a number of questions surrounding how the migrations will take place. What about insider discount, or certain unique account promos? Which plan will you be migrated to? Why are some customers not seeing a plan change at all?
T-Mobile hasn’t been too clear about those details surrounding the migration, and now that the official migration start date of July 13th, customers are beginning to see how poorly implemented this migration actually is.
Loss Of Free Lines
According to multiple users on Reddit as well as a few customers directly reaching out to me, T-Mobile has made some huge mistakes during the forced migration of some people. Namely, their free lines aren’t being migrated.
This user says that they were migrated from the Magenta plan to Experience Signature, and their bill went from roughly $50 per month to over $300. Their bill shows none of the free lines they had previously on their Magenta plan.
A comment on that same post says that they had a similar issue where one of their free lines didn’t carry over. Support told them that the specific free line promo that didn’t carry over was “ineligible” on the new plan, and instead gave them one year’s worth of credits for the cost of that now standard paid line.
Then there’s this comment elsewhere from a user saying they never received a migration text at all, yet they were moved from Magenta to Experience Signature as well and lost all their free lines, resulting in a $200 price increase.
Mysterious Hotspot Add-Ons
Another issue that some customers are seeing is a mysterious extra hotspot data add-on on their new plans.
Most of the new plans, like Experience Signature, already come with a ton of hotspot data, way more than the plans these customers have migrated from. And yet, for some reason, T-Mobile has added extra to their plans.
On its own, that wouldn’t be a problem. The issue is these add-ons are paid add-ons, and are adding as much as $15 to the monthly bill.
This user was migrated from Select Choice to Experience Signature. They signed in to their account and saw the standard 60GB of hotspot data included in their new plan. Great! Except they then saw that T-Mobile automatically enabled an extra 90GB hotspot add-on for an extra $15 per month, and never once informed the customer this was enabled.
A second user posted that their plan had a 70GB hotspot add-on enabled on their new plan for an extra $5 per month. They reached out to support, had it removed, and now the option is no longer available at all.
That could suggest some kind of automatic compensation to match the perks of their old plan, but it obviously hasn’t gone right. If T-Mobile has created special add-ons for these new plans to give customers matching perks from their old plans, they need to make sure they’re $0.
An Unacceptable Situation
These outcomes are unacceptable. One could argue that the price increases themselves were a necessary part of business. But to remove people’s free lines with no warning, causing extreme bill increases, isn’t going to fly. Adding hotspot add-ons that have a cost, without informing the customer, is also not OK.
Of course, we will assume, for now, that these things are a mistake, and T-Mobile will fix these issues for these customers. We’ve reached out for comment on exactly that and will update if we hear back.
Even so, these issues should absolutely not have happened in the first place. If you’re going to mass migrate a ton of your customer base to new plans, you need to make sure nothing goes wrong in the process. Now these customers have to take time out of their day to reach out to support and try to have these issues fixed.
For now, if you’re expecting a forced plan change on your next billing cycle, be sure to watch it like a hawk. There’s no telling what could get screwed up during the process.
