A Look Back at T-Mobile's Eight 'Un-carrier' Moves
T-Mobile, the "maverick" of the wireless service industry, unveiled its latest Un-carrier move, its eighth, last Tuesday. Here's a quick look at all of the carrier's attempts at changing carrier industry standards, starting with Un-carrier 1.0, back in March 2013.
Un-carrier 1.0: One of the biggest game-changers, the first T-Mobile Un-carrier event paved the way for the rest of the company's strategy. T-Mobile announced it would do away with contracts, moving to phone leasing instead. This way, the customer could opt out at any time and either give up the phone or pay for the remaining balance on it.
Un-carrier 2.0: Once again, another major move. This time T-Mobile attacked the archaic industry upgrade standards with its new JUMP program. Customers could now pay a little extra to be able to upgrade to a newer model faster than every two years (a result of the two-year contracts most major carriers used).
Un-carrier 3.0: Here T-Mobile began offering international travelers a boon: a plan that did away with international data roaming charges in over 100 countries. Heavy travelers could now use data networks and send messages without worrying about the usually heavy roaming charges.
Un-carrier 4.0: With Un-carrier 4.0, T-Mobile went head on against its rival three competitors. The nation's fourth largest wireless network stated that it would pay off the Early Termination Fees for a consumer if he or she switched over from Verizon, AT&T or Sprint. The announcement reflected T-Mobile's aggressive "everybody else sucks" marketing campaign.
Un-carrier 5.0: This Un-carrier move was a little more technical, focusing on T-Mobile's Wideband LTE and Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) expansion. Wideband LTE offers higher theoretical speeds than regular LTE and VoLTE allows for better voice quality and data transfer over the newer LTE networks.
Un-carrier 6.0: Announced soon after Un-carrier 5.0, this event unveiled T-Mobile's new music streaming service partnership with Rhapsody. Dubbed "Rhapsody unRadio," the new service offered T-Mobile customers access to a free (and ad-free) music streaming service. The partnership came in reaction to the large amounts of data T-Mobile saw subscribers using to play music on their mobile devices.
Un-carrier 7.0: T-Mobile ramped up its Wi-Fi offerings to customers and began allowing T-Mobile users "to call and text over any Wi-Fi connection for seamless coverage where no carrier network reaches -- even at 30,000 feet."
Un-carrier 8.0: Bringing back the rollover, T-Mobile's latest Un-carrier move involves allowing customers to roll over their unused data into next month. Best of all? This all comes at no additional cost for every single new and existing T-Mobile subscriber, and the company is giving every line in qualifying plans free 10GB of 4G LTE data.
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