T-Mobile today launched its weirdest promotion to date: a massive discount on two lines of unlimited service, but only if you’re 55 or over. It’s not the first time that T-Mobile thought way outside any kind of conventional box for its marketing, but this is the first time I can remember a wireless carrier targeting the niche of heavy data users over the age of 55.
The deal is genuinely fantastic: two lines of T-Mobile One, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data, for $60. To qualify, you have to be a new customer aged 55 or over. After that, there’s not many restrictions: one line is $50, and the second is $10, after a $5 auto-pay rebate. As with all of T-Mobile’s One lines, taxes and fees are included.
The one notable thing from the small print is that some other promotions, including KickBack, are not included. KickBack is a program that gives you $10 back per line on a One line if the data use is less than 2GB per month. It’s an incentive to get everyone in your family, not just the heavy data users, on the same family plan. In this instance, T-Mobile probably figured out that it would mean some users would get two full postpaid lines for $40 a month, assuming they aren’t heavy data users.
Even accepting that this is probably a clever play to get parents onto T-Mobile, followed by the rest of the family, it is refreshing to see a carrier treating older users as real customers, rather than technophobes who need special simple phones with large font.
