Roger Fingas
T-Mobile on Thursday began offering trial subscriptions in three U.S. cities, letting new customers test the carrier's network without having to commit to switching.
The program is currently limited to Atlanta, Austin, and Boston, and will only be available through the end of 2018, T-Mobile said. People who sign up will get a SIM card and Wi-Fi hotspot for 30 days, delivered via two-day shipping.
Trials also have a hard cap of 30 gigabytes, after which they can end prematurely. Video streaming is limited to 480p resolution, and while the hotspots can be used to roam, the amount of data used in such cases can't exceed 200 megabytes.
If a friend has already completed their trial, customers can borrow that hotspot and simply request a SIM card.
T-Mobile has tried hard to brand itself as the "uncarrier," willing to use unorthdox tactics to get a leg up on competitors. Some of these have been specifically Apple-focused — in 2014, for example, it gave people the option to borrow an iPhone 5 for a week, with a $700 hold on their credit card as insurance.
For several years the company offered a "Free Data for Life" plan to iPad owners, which included 200 megabytes per month. Grandfathered versions of the plan are still active, but T-Mobile cut off new activations in May 2017. Most iPads sold are believed to be Wi-Fi-only models anyway, since they're cheaper even without paid 4G data.
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4 Comments
I love their chutzpah!
Apple customers don't care about freebies. They demand high quality.
I've been more than tempted to kick AT&T to the curb, but not knowing how Verizon or TMobile or Sprint coverage would be I have never pulled the trigger. This could be a brilliant move by T-Mobile, let people see that coverage works for them and then real them in as new subscribers. I love this idea.And they appear to be going in alphabetical order, so Dallas should be up soon :)
I just switched from att to T-Mobile. There are five people on my plan and we kept bumping into our 10g data cap. I went to att and found to get more data it would cost me a bunch. The guy helping me suggested I call Customer Retention. My wife, our head negotiator, called and got a great plan that would cancel the monthly bill with data overages and post-update to the new plan. Well, they didn’t. A subsequent call to att said they have never had the plan that the first att employee told us about. My wife said she wanted to talk to a supervisor and the att rep said one would call the same evening. That was two weeks ago and the supervisor never called. My wife called for a manager and the manager never called back. Needless to say we switched to T-M and we are very happy.