Back in 2013, T-Mobile started a promo to give cellular iPads a lifetime of free service. Buy an LTE iPad from T-Mobile, and the network would give you 200MB of data per month for as long as you had the tablet.
But either that promo’s working too well or not at all, because T-Mobile has quietly updated the deal to reflect that new iPad purchases don’t qualify.
As of May 7, 2017, Free Data for Life is no longer available for new activations. If you signed up for FDFL on or before May 6, 2017, you can keep it with your current tablet as long as you own and use your tablet with T-Mobile.
There’s no immediate replacement plan for the Free Data for Life program. T-Mobile already offers a tablet data add-on to the T-Mobile One plan, which will give you unlimited data on the tablet for an additional $20 per month. That’s quite different to the Free Data for Life program, which was more of an occasional-use item for people who mostly used tablets around the house, and maybe wanted to check emails while on a train.
These days, free public Wi-Fi and smartphone tethering are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, which has seen sales of cellular-enabled tablets slip, compared to the cheaper Wi-Fi versions. For many people, public hotspots and smartphone tethering is enough data for mobile use, but it’s still sad that T-Mobile’s oldest Uncarrier promo is going away.
