T-Mobile has unveiled what is presumably its new pricing plan. I say presumably because the company will not confirm or deny that the plan appearing on its Web site is its new plan.
Assuming it is (and how can you not), what kind of deal is it
T-Mobile appears to be going to all prepaid with no monthly contract plans. For an individual, $50 gets you unlimited talk and text with 500 MB of data. After you use that 500 MB, you can still go on the Internet, but at a glacial speed. For another $10 a month, you get 2 GB of data before being slowed down, and for $20 a month you get “unlimited†data, although I suspect there is some fine print that I couldn’t locate.
This puts T-Mobile up against other prepaid plans, including Boost Mobile, which is on the Sprint Nextel network and has usually been the most competitive plan from a major carrier.
Here’s how the two compare.
Unlimited service for a smartphone - voice, text and data â€" on T-Mobile would be $70 a month. Unlimited service from Boost is $55 a month, or $60 a month for a BlackBerry. The price on Boost declines by $5 a month after six on-time payments, even if they are not consecutive. A Boost user can reduce the monthly bill by up to $15 a month that way.
As with other prepaid services, both require you to buy the phone up front. Usually a contract plan hides part of the cost of the phone in the monthly fee.
Boost smartphones range from $30 to $300. T-Mobile has a larger selection of smartphones priced at $50 to $680 and gives you the option of paying in full up front or making a down payment with a monthly fee for 24 months. The high-priced example is the Samsung Galaxy Note II, which is listed online at $200 down and $20 a month for two years, equal to the $680 cost to buy it outright. So although it’s a no-contract service, you still have a two-year commitment to pay off the phone.
Of course, you have to consider the network itself. If you want the fastest data speed, Sprint offers LTE, which is the speediest signal, but T-Mobile doesn’t. However, Sprint’s LTE is in a limited number of places. If you are not in a Sprint LTE city, T-Mobile may be faster, because its non-LTE network averaged higher speeds than competitors.
