American wireless carrier T-Mobile today announced Data Stash, as part of its Un-carrier 8.0 plan, enabling users to roll unused data and consume within one-year.
The new plan will be effective from January 2015, said John Legere, president and CEO for T-Mobile in a live interaction with journalists.
T-Mobile’s smartphone customers are now using an average of 3.5 GB per month.
Legere says the company has taken feedback and comments from American wireless customers before launching the new plans that will enable T-Mobile to taken on competition.
More than a third of U.S. businesses on shared data plans have been hit by overage penalties, and others resort to buying more data than they need.
“This year on Twitter, customers asked the carriers to create a program to roll data forward more than 40,000 times,” Legere said.
One more initiative to impact earnings
AT&T, Verizon and Sprint are yet to comment on the T-Mobile initiative. Recently, Verizon Wireless said it will take a hit on earnings in Q4 2014 due to the recent data competition.
T-Mobile US does not share earnings details.
Service revenues of T-Mobile for the third quarter of 2014 grew 10.6 percent, mainly due to growth in the company’s customer base and increased adoption of insurance and upgrade programs, partially offset by lower branded postpaid phone ARPU due to increased adoption of Simple Choice plans.
T-Mobile’s service revenue growth for the third quarter of 2014 accelerated compared to the second quarter of 2014 when service revenues increased by 7.1 percent.
In Q3 2014, T-Mobile reported 2.3 million net customer additions with 1.8 million total branded net customer additions, including branded postpaid net additions of 1.4 million and branded prepaid net additions of 411,000.
How Data Stash works
T-Mobile said Data Stash will be automatically available without any extra charge to every T-Mobile customer – individual, family and business – with a postpaid Simple Choice plan who has purchased additional 4G LTE data, 3GB or more for smartphones and 1 GB or more for tablets.
There’s no limit to how much data customers can collect in their Data Stash.
To promote Data Stash initiative, T-Mobile will offer 10 GB of 4G LTE free data for every line in the family on a qualifying plan.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
