American wireless carrier T-Mobile announced unlimited 4G LTE data plan for the whole family at a time when rival Verizon warned about a profit decline.
The price of the new Simple Choice family plan from T-Mobile is $100 per month for two people. For up to 10 people, customers need to spend $40 more per line to access data on its 4G LTE network, said T-Mobile in a statement.
Verizon on Monday said that it anticipates fourth-quarter promotional efforts and strong customer volumes will pressure profits in the short term.
AP reported that American customers of Verizon are departing at a higher rate in the current quarter than they did in the prior three-month period or in the same quarter a year ago, due to special offers from its main rivals such as AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. Wireless customer churn is happening even as it upgrades customers to 4G from a basic phone or 3G smartphones, said Verizon.
Last week Sprint, owned by SoftBank of Japan, announced a 50 percent discount to customers of AT&T and Verizon if they switched over. Sprint is the No. 3 U.S. cellphone carrier behind Verizon and AT&T.
T-Mobile with the latest unlimited LTE plan for family is trying to attract “confused wireless customers in the U.S.” Customers are confused because AT&T, Sprint and Verizon have 24 different family and promotional rate plans.
A recent survey says 81 percent of people describe all the data promotions in the wireless industry as somewhat confusing or very confusing. 75 percent say they hate policing their own family members’ data usage on the carrier’s shared data plans, while more than 40 percent worry about overage penalties on those plans.
John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile, said: “These plans are purpose-built to do one thing – take money from your pocket and put it into theirs. They threaten you with punishing overage penalties unless you police your own family’s data usage or up your data bucket and spend more every month.
In 2014, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint generated more than $1.5 billion in overage penalties. AT&T is the worst offender by far collecting more than half of overage penalties this year.
The company is offering the Unlimited 4G LTE family plan offer for a limited time. This is life time offer for US customers without any planned expiration date. All lines on their account must have unlimited 4G LTE data to continue to qualify.
T-Mobile is also re-introducing its 4 lines for $100 with 10GB of data promotion package.
Customers will get the extra data until 2016 starts, and after that, they will still get 1 GB of 4G LTE data per line.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
