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Wireless price war heats up as T-Mobile hits back at Sprint

Published Aug 25th, 2014 11:35AM EDT
T-Mobile Vs. Sprint Price War

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Last week marked the first time in a long time that Sprint really got serious about offering competitive data plans for both individuals and families, highlighted by its new $60 unlimited data plan for individual subscribers. But if you were expecting T-Mobile to take this challenge lying down — and really, based on its actions over the past 18 months, why would you? — then you’re about to be sorely disappointed.

T-Mobile on Monday announced that starting on September 3rd, it will be quadrupling the amount of capped data it’s offering for its entry-level Simple Starter plan while raising prices on the plan by only $5 per month. Previously, the Simple Starter plan offered budget-conscious subscribers a $40 plan that featured unlimited talk and text but that also featured a mere 500MB of monthly data. Next month, however, the “Un-carrier” will sweeten the pot and offer a Simple Starter plan that costs $45 per month but that also offers 2GB of data to go with unlimited talk and text.

Of course, as with the first version of the Simple Starter plan, you should realize that there’s a huge catch with this new plan: Unlike other capped T-Mobile plans that throttle your data connection down to 2G speeds if you exceed your monthly limit, the Simple Starter plans implement a hard data cap so that if you go over your monthly limit, you’ll be cut off from mobile data — period. T-Mobile says that if you run out of data on this plan and want to buy more before the start of the next month, you can buy a one-day pass that will give 500MB of new LTE data on the network for $5 or a one-week pass that will give you 1GB for $10.

All the same, this new option looks like a definite improvement over the first option and it’s always good to see wireless carriers actually coming up with ways to offer us more for our money.

Read more about T-Mobile’s new plan by clicking the source link below.

Brad Reed
Brad Reed Staff Writer

Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.