T-Mobile and its "Uncarrier" strategy are great. Selling people reasonable phone plans without locking them into ridiculous contracts is fantastic and consumer friendly. Unfortunately, good ideas don't always make good business sense. The head of T-Mobile's parent company said as much in a recent interview; T-Mobile literally can't afford to keep this "Uncarrier" bit up.
Deutsche Telekom's Timotheus Höttges recently told Re/Code that the its role as a "super-maverick" in the mobile market is interesting but probably not sustainable in the long run—unless T-Mobile gets acquired. "I hope that the political environment will change at one point in time," he said in reference to Sprint's abandoned plan to buy T-Mobile last year. "We had built an infrastructure and this infrastructure had to get utilized and we did that with very aggressive promotions," Höttges added in references to T-Mobile's aggressive strategy in the United States.
T-Mobile's tried everything from offering to cheap plans with no contracts to offering to rollover unused data to loffering to let you stream music for free to offering free data for referring friends. Heck, the company even hired Macklemore as a spokesman (of sorts).
It sucks that Verizon and AT&T have such a stranglehold on the rest of the market. But what the average American going to do? Switch to T-Mobile and hope it doesn't shit the bed after it inevitably gets acquired, maybe. Or at least be happy T-Mobile has been willing to go all out to try and get some consumer-friendly trends to catch on. [Re/Code via Ars Technica]
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