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Users say T-Mobile must pay for killing "lifetime" price lock
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoMore recent news that super irks me, T-Mobile bought a bunch of mmWave spectrum promising to deploy into it, and now are like, oh, sorry it would be expensive to actually meet the requirements & deploy to all this area; can we only take the good areas we want & give up the spectrum everywhere else? Ok so maybe someone might bite maybe but seems so so unlikely if they can't use the spectrum in any popular spaces! Structurally this spectrum auction had these conditions, these requirements to deploy broadly, for very obvious reasons. T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting. They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this. https://www.lightreading.com/5g/t-mobile-relinquishes-mmwave-spectrum-not-feasible-to-deploy https://www.lightreading.com/5g/t-mobile-relinquishes-mmwave...
- josefritzishere 2y agoMultiple ISPs bid purely to obstuct other parties from development. It's a chess move for a large business to maintain the status quo. I do agree that financial penalties are the only counter move.
- toast0 2y agoDid you actually expect anyone to deploy mmWave outside of stadiums, concert venues, and transit centers, and possibly a few blocks in NYC? It's not usable spectrum for mass deployment.
- selectodude 2y agoA decent chunk of Chicago is covered by mmWave
- Spooky23 2y agoThey did in cities as a cable displacement strategy. I have a little tower on my front lawn, idle. AT&T deployed in Baltimore. Verizon and TMobile in Manhattan, and I know Vz used Schenectady, NY as a pilot city.
- joecool1029 2y ago> They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this. I've been saying this for years about DISH, they sat on nationwide mid-band AWS spectrum for something like a decade with only a single tower built in Colorado. They only started a network buildout after T-Mobile was forced to make concessions during Sprint merger. This is super useful/valuable spectrum in the 1.6/2.1ghz range, and it was just wasted. They also bid on 600mhz licenses they couldn't use and acted like the good guys when they leased it to other carriers during COVID. The BRS/EBS (2.5ghz, band 41) spectrum was similarly a mess. The government gave tons of it to schools and nonprofits that would never use it, never had a need for it. They turned around and started their own market to license it out to companies that actually deployed it for LTE and 5G. In my area T-Mobile deployed more of this spectrum than the backhaul can even deliver. I can easily hit 1.4gbps between a few towers, 700mbps off a single tower (because that's the theoretical max after overhead on a 1gbps port). It's possible there's an argument to be made they were hoarding this, but they built it out, it's on-air and usable. > T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting. mmwave spectrum is just.... not that valuable? From a physics perspective it's blocked by too much and requires too much density to get effective deployment. They had a prior history of deploying tons of it, just not on the panels, they deployed it as radio backhaul between the towers in areas where fiber wasn't available. This spectrum should probably get light-licensed/flex-licensed because it's only really going to be needed/used in the most dense urban areas and for radio backhaul in challenging terrain.
- Spooky23 2y agoI think the Trump people were pushing it to “beat China” or something. In my area, Verizon used some pandemic emergency order to drop mmWave poles all over the place, including in the middle of sidewalks and within a few feet of existing poles. They did it at a frenzy pace, and to date haven’t turned any of them on.
- danielrhodes 2y agoThis reminds me of when I went in to a Patagonia store to repair a jacket with a “lifetime” warranty. Turns out they define lifetime as the “useful” lifetime of the product, which is a couple years. They refused to help and instead tried to sell me a new jacket.
- widowlark 2y agoI had nearly the opposite experience, getting a jacket of over 20 years replaced after I brought it in. You should go back and try again.
- rvschuilenburg 2y agoBy that standard we would have "lifetime" warranty on everything sold in The Nederlands, since by law we require warranty as long as you can reasonably expect a product to last.
- TimSchumann 2y agoYeah this is odd. I've taken multiple 10 year old T-Shirts with holes through 10% of them in to the Patagonia store and they've let me walk out with new product off the rack.
- daft_pink 2y agoYou should definitely try a different store or employee. I’ve heard nothing but great things about the patagonia lifetime warranty.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI wonder if you'd have luck in small claims court.
- BoringTimesGang 2y agoThis is how I got MSI to honour their warranty in spite of their stance that any failure at all is due to user error, since their products don't fail
- nerdjon 2y agoNot defending the use of the FAQ to clarify the clearly misleading marketing. But part of this article implies that the FAQ was not there at the time of signing up. First I am curious if this is actually true? If it is, does tmobile have any way of tracking the state of FAQ, contracts, etc at the time of signup instead of just the current version? Clearly the comments made by the CEO about being an "uncarrier" is plain crap if they pull stuff like this. When I first saw this I did not think about those that financed their phones through the carrier. That is a pretty horrible situation. Good idea to avoid financing through the carrier anyways and ideally hope the manufacture (like Apple) can do it.
- daft_pink 2y agoI got the text message warning of the price increase and I have several lines. Months later my first bill came and they only increased the price on two apple watch lines by $2 a month each so $4 per month increase on a monthly bill in the hundreds. Seemed rather silly actually as I thought I would be paying $40-50 a month more like the someone in the article described. I thought I would have a much bigger increase, so clearly they have the ability to track which contracts were valid during the period of sign up and that’s encoded into their billing system.
- dotancohen 2y agoIt is likely a frog boiling. You didn't complain on the $2 / month increase. They'll now try a $2 increase every six months.
- thimabi 2y agoI love the fact that one of the customers used T-Mobile’s own Terms and Conditions to refute the notion that prices could be increased, regardless of the language in the FAQ. As the article reports, this is what the terms valid at the time said: “If you are on a price-lock guaranteed Rate Plan, we will not increase your monthly recurring Service charge ('Recurring Charge') for the period that applies to your Rate Plan, or, if no specific period applies, for as long as you continuously remain a customer in good standing on a qualifying Rate Plan.” That’s a pretty massive screw-up on the part of T-Mobile’s legal department. I sure hope this helps the affected customers.
- josefritzishere 2y agoSorry to report that there is no legal definition of a "lifetime" warranty. The definition should be in the fine print where it can be deemed to mean anything. If it's not in the fine print then it is literally meaningless.
- grayhatter 2y agowho sold you on that lie? The article has me believing T-Mobile said "your lifetime", given they were also exclusively marketing that to people over the age of 55, it seems obvious that a reasonable person would conclude that meant the remainder of the named individual's life. Which does seem to be the conclusion many people drew, given the number of complaints to the FTC. Just because lifetime guarantee does often mean "reasonable lifetime of the product", which does differ, and requires reasonable maintenance, doesn't mean you can just make shit up. Otherwise you put yourself in this very position where you need to argue and prove exactly what a reasonable person would conclude the contract meant. Words don't suddenly become meaningless just because the "fine print" is ambiguous.
- SoftTalker 2y agoWords and phrases definitely have meanings in contract law, established by precident. They are not always what the layman would presume they mean however.
- hunter2_ 2y agoI'll accept that there could be precedent to use non-layman definitions of certain words, but how do you apply that justification to this quote from TFA: > "T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan," the company said in a pledge that enticed many people to switch plans or even switch from another carrier to T-Mobile. I don't think it's reasonable to use anything but regular definitions for the words in that particular quote. Rather, they are pulling this off a completely different way: > "We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost." So the price of the service is not changing during the reasonable lifetime of the service nor the lifetime of the consumer. Rather, the service is no longer being offered.
- jdlyga 2y agoAbsolute lol, I never trust those lifetime price locks unless it's enforceable by contract.
- Spivak 2y agoI think that's the point. Advertising anything as such should be the contract. It's unambiguous to everyone except the person who's paid to be confused. Stuff of the form Claim A* * Actually not A Should be illegal. Someone buying a product isn't a lawyer and shouldn't need one. Fine print in take-it-or-leave-it contracts that don't encode a persons reasonable expectation of the purchase agreement should be thrown out and labeled deceptive advertising.
- dataflow 2y ago> Stuff of the form > Claim A* > * Actually not A > Should be illegal. Sounds simple in theory, but not so simple in practice? You can't possibly encode all the legitimate exclusions into a big banner you can advertise, and nobody wants to read an essay to figure out the common case. You'd need to draw the line somewhere and I'm not sure that's an easy boundary to delineate.
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI don't trust them regardless. AFAIK, they're effectively voided by bankruptcy. So a company can profit from such claims, and then ultimately go bankrupt to protect those already-dispersed profits. (IANAL, so I'm probably missing some major caveats.)
- mrguyorama 2y agoI would be fine with a company I've bought a "lifetime" service contract from went bankrupt and I lost it that way. That at least makes sense to a consumer and is something they should be able to figure out from a company advertising a negative revenue product. "Lifetime" of the company is fine to me, and is a fine way to judge the value of a "lifetime" product; How likely is this company to still exist in ten years? This is the reason I don't buy Nebula's $300 lifetime plan. I want the company to succeed and still be here in ten years, so I don't want to take that offer and contribute to their bankruptcy.
- vzaliva 2y agoThat reminds me of Flickr, which took my monthly fee with the promise of lifetime storage for uploaded photos, even if I stopped paying. Of course, they broke that promise. I don’t use them anymore, but some of my friends still do, despite the betrayal of trust. The backstory is that the company was sold, but I don’t think that’s an excuse. If a buyer is allowed to purchase the business and keep the name and customers, they should take on the previous obligations. Otherwise, they should call it something else or make customers re-register.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoSorry, they promised to store your photos even if you stopped paying? Was the idea that you couldn't upload new, but you'd still have access to old, or did you have to pay a "get them out of cold storage" fee? Either way, that's a bizarre business model.
- joecool1029 2y agoSvbtle, a blog hosting service, follows this business model as well: https://svbtle.com/promise https://svbtle.com/promise I've let my card lapse on it for a few months and they never deleted anything (I just hadn't been posting either).
- vzaliva 2y agoThey promised to keep the files hosted forever with live URLs so people could see them. I agree; it is a bizarre business model. I recall they had a limit on how much you could upload each month, so I guess they calculated how monthly fees would cover the lifetime storage.
- beojan 2y agoThere was no monthly fee.
- josefresco 2y agoGoogle Photos made a similar promise. They said "as long as you let us optimize your photos, the service will be free and unlimited". I started syncing my photos and I think 12 months later they announced the end of the policy. I never paid so I'm not really that surprised but it was a quick about-face.
- htrp 2y agoI am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. --Darth Vader Seriously though, this is one of the things that we need strong consumer protections for.
- SoftTalker 2y agoBut also don't be a complete rube as a customer. Caveat Emptor. If a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is an escape clause somewhere in the fine print, you'll find it if you read it.
- r00fus 2y agoTaken to the logical extreme, you wouldn't buy anything because any promise made by a vendor is fake. People used social proof of Tmobile's lifetime pricing for years. Then new management comes in, and they can renege on existing contracts? That should be illegal unless you think contracts are BS too.
- SoftTalker 2y agoNo, I don't think contracts are BS, but I also have lived long enough to know that any time words like "free" and "lifetime" or "always" or "never" are used in a marketing campaign, there's always a catch.
- wink 2y agoBuying something like this as a 30y old? Yeah, probably garbage. But if I read that correctly that they specifically marketed that to retired people or close to retiring... it kinda sounds different. 55 to 75 (or whatever the average lifespan was when this was up), you might want to think they thought this through. Lifelong rental agreements after selling your property are not uncommon in some countries, and you should know that you're gambling.
- borski 2y agoThere isn’t always. AA still honors AAirpass, their lifetime free tickets for $250k https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAirpass https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAirpass
- blagie 2y agoThe reason this is more of a scam is that many people are glad to initially pay more in return for a lifetime price lock. Many of us stuck it out with T-Mobile plans despite better options at the time because we're okay paying more now in return for a guarantee of not paying more later. If T-Mobile is not honoring this once it no longer benefits them, a minimum penalty should be the price difference between T-Mobile and the cheapest similar option over the lifetime of the plan. If I paid $50/month, and there was a $30/month option through Mint, MetroPCS, etc. for four years with the same data / talk limit, I should get back a minimum of 48 months * $20 ≈ $1000 (increased by a bit, assuming money was held in an index fund in the meantime). Part of the reason this matters is many companies use similar lifetime tactics to get started. Nebula has $300 lifetime plans, which provided much of the early capital they needed. If this doesn't work anymore, it pisses in the pool for everyone wanting to do something similar. It's perfectly fine to have early customers fund you with (eventually money-losing) lifetime plans, to buy marketshare this way, etc. There are a lot of business models which go away if this can't be relied on.
- dotancohen 2y agoI's say that they should refund to you the entirety of your expected payments over the course of your expected lifetime. That would be their recourse towards you if you were to breach a contract with them, no? If you sign a $50/month contract for 36 months, and back out after 10 months, will they not come after you for $50 * 26 = $1300?
- beerandt 2y agoYea it should cost more to break the contract than to honor it.
- imglorp 2y agoThis, in a marketplace where words like "purchase" and "unlimited"[1] don't mean what you think they do. "Lifetime" surely can't mean that either. The FTC has been growing some teeth again, and needs to stay vigilant. 1. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/01/are-you-former-att-unlimited-data-plan-customer-read https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/01/are-you-for...
- neilv 2y agoThis article seems to be quoting a lot of individual comments, rather than giving a concise summary of the situation.
- JohnMakin 2y agoMaybe it's not the exact same thing, but I got suckered into a similar thing for a "lifetime" NordVPN subscription for $120 or something, only to get re-billed 2 years later. I like the service so I kept it, but it really rankled me. Seems like you shouldn't be able to do things like this so easily - companies, especially telecoms, have gone full "fuck you" mode the last 10 years to their customers and this is a prime example.
- terminalbraid 2y agoThere are VPNs out there with better business practices. You'll find these are ones that don't blow disproportionate amounts of money on advertising strategies like "carpet bomb you with influencer endorsements"
- JohnMakin 2y agoI have my own VPN I setup for anything serious. I like the interface and convenience of this one better than anything else, but yea, I agree. Their claim also that they don't keep logs or give any user info away I know is disputed and probably generally untrue, but they seem like one of the better behaved commercial ones that won't use your bandwidth as an unwitting node in their network (at least from what I can tell, if this is untrue, please correct me). It's one of those tiny costs that ultimately don't matter, "the principle" of it is sometimes not worth it to me to do anything about. VPN is a generally scummy business from what I can tell.
- mandibles 2y agoBlame inflation. If money maintained stable value over the long term, companies could honestly make promises about "lifetime" pricing. These promises were probably made during the "low 2%" inflation of the past, but basic economic understanding would point out that such a plan is doomed. Better yet, in a deflationary monetary regime, a constant price would net the companies more profit over time. Users would probably clamor for lowered prices on these plans, and companies could advertise "Lifetime pricing plans are now cheaper! You get more for less!"
- terminalbraid 2y agoInflation isn't a new concept and certainly one that T-Mobile could have (and should have) considered if this were the reason.
- mrgoldenbrown 2y agoNo need to blame inflation. Inflation is not new or secret. T-Mobile knew about inflation when it made promises. It could have included an inflation adjustment in their "uncontract". The blame is squarely on T-Mobile here.
- plorg 2y agoI'm looking at the "lifetime" app upgrades I paid for in 2016 that, technically, are still active but whose features are all deprecated, meanwhile there are are plenty of new features offered for a $10/mo subscription that the app continues to nag me about.
- throw7 2y agoBuyer beware with "lifetime**" guarantees. The asterisks and fine print often are enlightening. Scammers always have an out too... go out of business and setup shop under a different name. I remember hearing a local tire shop offering some type of "tires for life" deal. They went "out of business" and the owners started a new shop.
- monksy 2y agoI got screwed over by this for SongKong from JThink. They sold lifetime prices at higher costs. Then it came out that they guy didn't want to honor it anymore and switched to a yearly license. In the yearly he claims "oh i'll give the lifetimers 1 year free and perpetual for the license year you bought when you renew". Turns out after he doesn't even honor that. I bought a year, and then he won't archive the older versions. Have a broken copy because his api key internally broke? Didn't download all versions during that year.. yea you're shit out of luck.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]