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T-Mobile to offer free unlimited international data, texts
- wandermatt 13y agoList of countries here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425436,00.asp
- leeoniya 13y agooops, someone forgot an 'ORDER BY country ASC', or more likely to hit the Sort A->Z key in Excel. ::rageface::
- codemac 13y ago% cat /tmp/tmobile_countries | sort | pbcopy Aland Islands Anguilla Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Bahrain Barbados Belgium Bermuda Bolivia Bonaire Brazil British Virgin Islands Bulgaria Cambodia Canada Cayman Islands Chile China Christmas Island Colombia Costa Rica Curacao Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Dominica Dominican Republic Easter Island Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Estonia Faeroe Islands Finland France French Guiana Germany Ghana Greece Grenadav Nicaragua Guadeloupe Guatemala Guyana Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Kenya Kuwait Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malaysia Malta Martinique Mexico Moldova Montserrat Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Zealand Norway Pakistan Panama Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Qatar Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Singapore Sint Maarten Slovakia South Africa South Korea Spain Sri Lanka St. Barthelemy St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Martin St. Vincent & the Grenadines Suriname Svalbard Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Trinidad and Tobago Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Zambia
- cocoflunchy 13y agoEven better: pbpaste | sort | pbcopy
- aray 13y agoHas anyone made a coverage map yet? That would be useful (going to be limited by radio coverage/standards/countries/etc)
- zonkey 13y agohttp://opensignal.com http://opensignal.com Don't know how accurate it can be.
- nknighthb 13y agoIt has no useful relationship to reality. It relies on a self-selecting group of people to download and run their app to collect data, and then presents that data in what I'm sure is a precise but utterly inaccurate form. If you believe it, there is no signal from any carrier at either my current home in Washington, nor my previous home in Santa Clara. And there is certainly no T-Mobile, AT&T, or other GSM carrier signal to be found anywhere near my current home (my AT&T iPhone stubbornly insists on working regardless).
- r00fus 13y agoHell yes. It would cost TMO very little to provide this to me, as I travel very infrequently. But I consider it to be a very nice perk indeed.
- jordanthoms 13y agoThis is _awesome_!
- jsnk 13y agoDoes anyone know if 30 dollar prepaid plan (100 minutes. Unlimited data and text) included in this deal?
- gabbo 13y agoDoesn't seem like it: > New and existing T-Mobile customers who are on a post-paid plan are eligible for the new international plan, which kicks off on October 31
- brownbat 13y agoI'm not even sure you're going to be able to find that plan anymore. [EDIT: dangrossman's right, they still have this plan on the "prepaid" side, but you have to dig a bit. If you're a brand new customer to T-Mobile, you're not exactly going to stumble on it from the main page.] The website really looks like they're bumping everyone up to the $50+ plans, which is sad, because they owned the value data plan territory for a while. Case in point, I'm currently paying them $25/mo for 1.5 GB of high speed data. No contract, BYOD. I originally thought I needed "unlimited" data, but found that if I just avoid videos until I'm around wifi (which I'm around way more often than I thought I would be), then I never touch the limit. So how's the $50 per month for 500 MB high speed plus unlimited everything else compare? Ting offers 500 MB for under $20 / mo, and you can even pay-as-you-go to save money, or cover overages at a reasonable rate. For $50 per month, Cricket gives you 2.5GB of 4G speeds per month, falling back to unlimited 3G speeds, 5GB for $60 or 10GB for $70. Neither are BYOD, though, which can be a deal killer. T-Mobile had great pricing, but now they're just normalizing with the larger players like Sprint and AT&T, drifting away from the bargains offered by the mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), probably pulling the whole market upwards.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- quink 13y agoJust in case anyone hasn't noticed this: > While the data is free, it won't be particularly fast. Customers can expect network speeds at around the same level that they get in the US after they are throttled. Chief Marketing Officer Mike Sievert said the average speed customers would get would be around 128 kilobits a second. Think of it more of an extension of the Kindle 3G business model rather than anything else. The maximum one could theoretically suck through that straw, at 24/7, is 40 GB a month.
- nwh 13y agoBetter than the $2/MB we pay for international data in Australia.
- _delirium 13y agoThat still sounds pretty reasonable, considering that at normal roaming-data prices, that 40 GB would cost you about $10,000. Between a speed cap and insane prices, I'll take the speed cap!
- mikeash 13y ago128kbps is pretty slow, but it's fine for basic use. That's basically a mediocre EDGE connection like the original iPhone without great coverage, and while it was no speed demon, it was certainly usable. It'll let you send instant messages, and check your e-mail and get directions if you're patient. I could easily see surviving on a plan like this while traveling.
- aaronbrethorst 13y agoAlthough the difference between EDGE and LTE is vast, it pales in comparison to the difference between data and no data.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoCan't even say how many times I really wanted data during our recent trip to Korea. It would have been profoundly useful on some occasions.
- trimbo 13y agoNoted it is 2G only, but it is a great step forward.
- unsignedint 13y agoIt'll certainly be huge step forward -- I sometimes go to Japan, and it's hard to find pay phones these days, and they make me jump through a lot of hoops getting prepaid phone there, if that's even possible as a foreigner...
- andrewpi 13y agoI used b-mobile in Japan for a pre-paid data-only SIM earlier this year. They will even mail the SIM to the airport so it is waiting for you when you arrive.
- unsignedint 13y agoHow much do they cost these days? I remember they were bit pricy... (and quick search really doesn't reveal how much it is any more?)
- craftkiller 13y agoT-Mobile has realized exactly what a carrier is supposed to be and ironically named it "Uncarrier". No more subsidizing phones, no more contracts, just a pipe. We will move data between your phone and the world for a flat fee and that is the end of the story. I switched to T-Mobile about a month ago because I agree with their business practices and want to support their growth.
- xster 13y agoCarriers outside North America are what carriers are supposed to be.
- mikeash 13y agoT-Mobile's policies over the past couple of years have really made me want to become a customer. Plans that are actually reasonably priced, explicitly calling out handset subsidies and making them optional, and now this. I just wish their network was a little better!
- joelrunyon 13y agoI just switched in April after hating life with AT&T and deciding to put my money where my mouth was. In cities - their coverage is VERY good. Countryside & cross country road trips are where they fall off the map, but I've been very happy paying $80 for unlimited call/text/data + No B.S. T-Mobile is way behind in terms of users & they know it - which means they're making strong plays against the competition. Makes me want to bet on them for no other reason than to force the other carriers to step up their game.
- mikeash 13y agoYour report matches my impression of their coverage. I head out of the city just often enough to go with a carrier that has better coverage. I've thought about getting some cheap plan on a better carrier for those occasions, but it's not quite worth the trouble. They're so close!
- joelrunyon 13y agoWorth noting - as part of the fall out with the AT&T deal - they got a ton of bandwidth from AT&T and they're putting it to good use across their spectrum. Not quite on par with AT&T/Verizon - but getting there!
- antimatter 13y agoI switched to T-Mobile last month after Apple released the 5s. This has also been my experience.
- rhizome 13y agoNow reflect on this old news: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile_USA_by_AT%26T http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_purchase_of_T-Mobile_...
- chrsstrm 13y agoThis is great. I had an incident in Belize this year where I turned off airplane mode to connect to wifi on the boat I was on and my cellular radio auto-connected to Belize's local mobile carrier without me realizing (I had international roaming enabled on my account). My phone started syncing and updating apps in the background and within 2 minutes of passive usage I had amassed $270 in data charges. Only. 2. Minutes. I plead my case when I got back to the states and they removed the charges without a thought (although I had to send in a written appeal). International data rates are ridiculous and it's nice to see a carrier acting rationally.
- djim 13y agoexact same thing happened to me in belize to the tune of $1500. i checked with AT&T before my trip and they assured me that belize was covered per my international plan, but then backtracked and told me they specifically said it wasn't covered when i disputed the bill. i clearly remember the call as i was deciding between buying a local sim and just using at&t's roaming plan. lesson learned: always get a local sim. it's cheaper.
- mjn 13y agoTo avoid this (common) issue, EU regulations now mandate a roaming-fee cutoff at €50 until the account-holder positively indicates their knowledge and acceptance of additional roaming fees. They can also pre-authorize a higher cutoff if they really do expect to be incurring more than €50 in roaming fees and don't want to be cut off, but this must be an explicit opt-in (not the default terms of a data plan). The result is that your losses in the case of unexpected data syncing are at least limited by default. But only within the EU, of course.
- chrsstrm 13y agoThat was a big portion of the basis of my appeal; a carrier shouldn't allow charges to be compounded that high and that fast. There were alert SMS messages stating my data charges balance, but the $50, $100, and $200 alerts all arrived at the exact same time, literally all had the same timestamp. If I had been capped at $50 and then prompted in order to continue, I would have paid the fee and learned my lesson.
- fatjokes 13y agoOkay, I was about to quit T-Mo this winter for Verizon, but I'll stick around a little longer. Points for effort. It's desperately needed to compensate for the shitty coverage.
- vpeters25 13y agoThey got this website were you can report coverage issues: http://www.t-mobile-takeaction.com http://www.t-mobile-takeaction.com I reported I had barely a signal inside my house, a couple weeks later I had 5 bars.
- ShinyObject 13y agoThis is very interesting. 128kbit is fast enough for Google Maps which is good enough for me. I know they said the free overseas data is only for contract customers but I wonder if they will allow us pre-paid people to add on the "packs" they mention before going on a trip.
- aaronbrethorst 13y agoAnd this is why competition and effective government regulation[1] are fantastic things. If T-Mobile wasn't in a distant fourth place in the US market, or if they'd been acquired by AT&T we wouldn't be seeing this, nor would we see Verizon and AT&T introduce their own versions of T-Mobile's JUMP program. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/19/att-tmobile-merger-dead/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/19/att-tmobile-merger-dead/
- eurleif 13y ago>If T-Mobile wasn't in a distant fourth place in the US market, or if they'd been acquired by AT&T we wouldn't be seeing this, nor would we see Verizon and AT&T introduce their own versions of T-Mobile's JUMP program. I'm not an economist, and I haven't looked into the details of the cell phone market in depth, but here's a possible alternative opinion. I'm not asserting that this is the case; just wondering if it might be. Would T-Mobile be able to treat customers as well if they were more popular, or are they only in this position because their ratio of customers to cell towers, spectrum, and other capital is lower? And if the latter is true, isn't that an inefficient use of resources, which market forces (i.e. the merger) would have corrected if not for government intervention?
- aaronbrethorst 13y agoOstensibly, VZW and AT&T enjoy certain economies of scale above and beyond T-Mobile given their significantly greater customer bases. T-Mobile has a perception of shitty service, which means they have to spend a metric shit-ton of money buying spectrum and building out their LTE network. Take a look at T-Mobile's their most recent 10-Q filing. Their EPS is actually negative: http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1283699/000128369913000115/tmus06302013form10q.htm http://edgar.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1283699/00012836991...
- tanzam75 13y agoDo note that T-Mobile USA paid $225 million in "Interest expense to affiliates." The affiliate, in this case, is Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile. If this had been structured as preferred equity rather than debt, then it would turn into dividends and move "below the line" on the income statement. T-Mobile USA would then magically be making a profit. And of course, you're just looking at one quarter: Q2 2013. Q1 2013 was profitable. Q1 + Q2 was also profitable. T-Mobile USA is not out of the woods yet. But they're in better shape than they were in 2011.
- lobster_johnson 13y agoI wonder if they have added more roaming agreements to their network. Last time I was in Norway, there was no coverage at all -- no network, no calls, never mind Internet access -- which I found strange. Usually you will be able to connect to via local network and pay for roaming charges. Norway is all GSM, same frequency band, and my plan has International calling, but I still had to swap out the SIM card for my Norwegian one. Could be a fluke, of course. Edit: Or it may be that pay-as-you-go doesn't provide international roaming. I love T-Mobile's approach, and the whole reason I use them is because they are the underdog who's doing things a little differently.
- hencq 13y agoIt does provide international roaming. At least in the Netherlands I have no problem using my pay-as-you-go plan. However, I had exactly your experience in China: I could only make emergency calls.
- firloop 13y agoI was in Norway as well and I did not get any reception on my T-Mobile phone until I contacted the account holder on our family plan (they were still in the US) and had them add international roaming to our post-paid plan. Immediately afterwards my phone was able to connect to a network, so I think roaming with T-Mobile is opt-in.
- rallison 13y agoI have been quite pleased to see T-Mobile continuing to provide AT&T and Verizon with some competition. I sampled T-Mobile for a couple of months with their $30 unlimited data/text plan and was pleasantly surprised with the performance in the LA area - on a Nexus 4 (without LTE), speeds were generally better than on AT&T. The only reason I finally went back to AT&T was for rural coverage, as I do enough traveling that this was an issue. Were it not for that, I would have gladly stayed with T-Mobile.
- grecy 13y agoI continue to be dumbfounded that intelligent people would call this "free". The degree to which marketing has invaded our everyday lives is astonishing. It's not free, you're paying a monthly fee for it.
- SeoxyS 13y agoThis is huge. I recently spent ~$200 on AT&T's $30/120MB bundles on a two-week trip to Europe. I thought I was getting a good deal, too. It's fantastic to see the market shifting slightly in favor of the customers.
- brendanf 13y agoYou can get unlimited data plans in Europe for 10-40 euro per month.
- klausjensen 13y agoThat work in all of Europe? Or in individual markets?
- brendanf 13y agoI believe they will work in most of the EU for carriers like Vodafone, but you may have to pay roaming. You can also get roaming packages from some of the carriers such as Alditalk http://www.alditalk.de/web/internet-prepaid-tarif/eu_internet_paket_60/ http://www.alditalk.de/web/internet-prepaid-tarif/eu_interne...
- X-Istence 13y agolast time I was in Europe I got a sim from T-Mobile, pre-paid, loaded up with 25 EUR, and had 3 GB of data to use. Which is great because my grandparents on my dads side don't believe in getting internet access! Tethering my phone got me through without withdrawal symptoms ;-)
- bobbles 13y agoDoes this mean that as an Australian.. If i somehow managed to get a T-Mobile SIM and account I could use this for international travel? (Not expected to use it as the main sim in Australia though)
- qzervaas 13y agoEngadget says you must be in the US for 6 weeks of a 3 month period to use this
- dmnd 13y agoI wish they announced this before the iPhone 5s launch - I just signed a new 2-year contract with AT&T.
- iNeal 13y agoYou can probably still return it.
- badclient 13y agoMy brother manages our family account with AT&T with 7 lines. I casually read the title of this post. His response? "We're switching."
- collypops 13y agoThe pebble that starts an avalanche of long-overdue awesomeness for consumers
- jonny_eh 13y agoI wonder if this'll be available with their ridiculously amazing $30 per month pre-paid plan. https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/b8c4a2164434 https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/b8c4a2164434
- andrewpi 13y agoNo, the $30 plan is a pre-paid plan. This new offering is only on the post-paid plans.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dude3 13y agoI switched to t-mobile from Verizon. I have actually been really happy with the service. My plan is unlimited data 5 gigs of 4g data/unlimited 3g and 100 minutes of talk time for $30 a month. Every extra minute is .10 over the 100 minutes. So my plan ends up being $50 a month. But compare that to any other carrier and its a much better price. Also, I like that it's a German company and didn't sell out like Verizon giving 1,000,000+ members phone numbers to the NSA.
- dude3 13y agoAlso I can use the SIM in international phones in the US. I have a french phone.
- liquidcool 13y agoI did a bunch of traveling earlier this year and getting local SIM card is pretty easy and cheap (~$20/mo), and has the advantage of allowing local calls. In Bangkok and Kyiv you can get them at any 7-11 or electronics store. Philippines and Prague it was a visit to a carrier. The rough patch was Tokyo, but you can rent a mobile hotspot for a reasonable amount and have it delivered to the airport. If you're only there for a few days, free roaming is very nice to have, but if you're there a week or more I think it's worth the small effort to get the local SIM. That also allows me to keep Straight Talk prepaid in the US with my own phone. YMMV, but this was the most economical, flexible route for me.
- hydralist 13y agoi pay 30$ for unlimited data and 100 min. damn good if u ask me, although a lot of dead zones (aka Edge only) in SF
- hussong 13y agoI wish the German T-Mobile mothership were as customer-friendly as the US operation.
- nomercy400 13y agoReally nice idea, and a good step forward. I was wondering, if this truly is an 'international' package deal, does this also mean it will be available 'internationally' at the start, instead of just the US?
- jasonkester 13y agoGood to hear. US carriers do a terrible job of dealing with anything international. It's as though they're honestly surprised that anybody would ever want to leave the USA or make a phone call to anybody in another country. An example: I flew to the 'states this weekend. Once on the ground, I topped up my American (T-Mobile) sim with a month's worth of credit. (There was no way to do this from abroad since their sims don't work there at all, and their website has a ridiculous country redirect even from your account page). At the airport, on the way home, I sent a text to my wife letting her know I was on the way. It failed. I tried again to various permutations of the French number, with absolutely no success. Googling around, it seems that you can't do that with t-mobile. You can't even get them to turn it on, since their "international" packages only work with their contract services. Not just roaming, but even placing a phone call to another country is impossible with pre-paid t-mobile. Sure enough, landing in Paris, the phone was dead dead dead. No "welcome to France" message. No extortionate international roaming charges. Just no ability to make calls at all. I had to pop my UK sim back in just to be able to use the phone again. I'm looking forward to the first company (in any country) that truly gets all this. They'll get my business, as well as pretty much all the business from anybody who travels at all.
- corin_ 13y agoVodafone (UK) are awesome within Europe - when I am abroad I pay £2.50/day to use my normal price plan abroad (so I still get unlimited minutes/texts, and 6GB data, for no cost other than that daily fee). For calling European numbers they aren't quite as good, but for £5/month the prices drop from £1/min to between 5p and 20p/min depending on the type of number I'm calling. Outside Europe they're still awful though, something like £1.50/min to call to America/Asia from UK, and same for both placing and receiving calls when in those continents. Last time I was in America I picked up a cheap phone at a supermarket that gave me 1c/min phonecalls to anywhere in the US or even abroad - including calling UK mobile phones. That saved me a lot of money.
- rs 13y agoThink the trick to overseas is to get a local pre-paid SIM card, and use that number locally. As pre-paid SIM cards are getting more pervasive around the world, normally this works out as the cheapest option. Naturally, there are some countries where purchasing a pre-paid SIM is near impossible, or costly enough that sticking to roaming with your current provider works out cheaper.
- NemesorZandrak 13y agoThis will be amazing in Europe. From jan In Eu all carriers have to drop roaming charges and people now are traveling exponentially more than they used to 10-15 years ago. This is big. I know everyone focuses on USA and china bit old continent still has potential ;)
- adrinavarro 13y agoHuh? Roaminng charges are hardly going anywhere. And that would be in July 1st… And countries have opposed the measure.
- tomp 13y agoIt would be nice if someone would modify the title to clarify that this is the US T-Mobile (not the UK or CRO or any other).
- nathana 13y agoThe most interesting part about this to me is the $0.20/min voice price. Not because it would have a direct impact on me or anything like that, but mostly because it seems like in the US, carriers are falling over themselves to offer "unlimited voice" while restricting the data. This is the exact opposite.
- aCCelerate 13y agoAh, all this roaming here there everywhere discussion reminds me of one of my fundamental wishes for a new startup to tackle: create a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) which essentially just roams everywhere (including the home country) but always picks the strongest signal of all available wireless carriers. I hate to be in an area and not have coverage. I carry another prepaid sim card around just for that case but obviously that's a different number then. I'll be happy to pay a premium if that was available. And then maybe one day we can also get rid of the sim cards and just do it in software... I don't get why we still have sim cards.
- rdl 13y agoI'm on a month long trip to Asia right now (today: Sendai), and remembering why I used to keep a tmobile blackberry and BES just for travel. Flat rate $80/mo unlimited edge to the BES (which I used for email and then tunneling IP from my laptop) was worth it even when I only used it one or two months a year; absolutely worth it when I was overseas full time. Sadly I let it lapse and am now playing the "find a local LTE dongle" game, which in Japan is a JPY 1260/day old Huawei LTE android device on SoftBank which is the 5th phone and 8th computing device I'm lugging around on trains and such. Seriously going to look at MVNO options when I get back; running a pro privacy, pro customer MVNO, ideally based in a country with strong privacy laws, and handsets transparently configured to be safe for customers (even when the local carrier is turning over data..) would be pretty fun.
- kin 13y agoThis is great. Sometimes I travel out of the US and am pretty much phoneless unless I purchase a temp sim card or something. T-Mobile is doing pretty disrupting things in the mobile service market and I hope it pays off for them.
- matthewmcg 13y agoThis is a logical offer for them to make. Many of their customers will have unlocked phones, so they aren't in a position to force those customers to use overpriced international data plans (e.g. AT&T's $120 for 800MB/mo). The competition is the cheap nano-SIM card in the airport vending machine.
- EveretteTaylor 13y agoJust another marketing ploy by T-Mobile, their service and coverage isn't even close to their competitors. I see this as more of sign that things are crumbling.