When you’re CEO of America’s No.4 wireless carrier, you can afford to be a little colorful. Per PCMag, T-Mobile CEO John Legere decided to bring some much-needed spice to the Consumer Electronics Show this week by speaking candidly about his company’s rivals and the state of the mobile industry as a whole. Legere said that AT&T’s (T) mobile data service in New York is “crap” before backtracking and saying that he didn’t mean to “say the network’s crap, it’s just not as good as ours.”
On Verizon (VZ), Legere praised the company’s “beautiful network” and said that it deserves credit for “the way they covered those dust bowl states with LTE.” However, Legere also dinged Verizon for its decision to go with shared data plans and questioned whether such plans would be economically feasible for both users and carriers going forward.
“Shared data plans are a thing of the past,” he said. “A 10-gigabyte, 5-device shared data plan, when Joe Schmoe Junior starts to watch porn on his phone, isn’t going to work.”
And finally, Legere defended his company’s decision to ditch smartphone subsidies all together and suggested that people who believe smartphone subsidies save them money are just suckers.
“You are not getting a $99 phone,” he said. “Anyone who thinks they are, come with me into the back. While you’re handcuffed, they go into your pockets and they take your money.”
