“T‑Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T‑Mobile ONE plan.” That was the promise. The Un-contract. The whole reason millions of customers picked the magenta team over Verizon and AT&T in the first place. Now T-Mobile is retiring legacy 3G and 4G-era plans — Magenta, ONE, Simple Choice — and automatically moving customers onto “modern” 5G plans at higher monthly costs. Billing changes hit mid-July for the current wave. The company that swore it would never surprise you with a rate hike just sent the notification.
T-Mobile raised our rate last year which is bad enough by itself after promising not to, but they also seriously reduced the quality and availability of their customer service. Why stick around for that? We switched to a much cheaper prepaid company (~1/3rd T-Mobile’s current price) and couldn’t be happier.
Edit: Was thinking about the other problems we had with T-Mobile and forgot to mention one big problem… Incoming calls routinely would not ring and voicemails left just vanished. This happened for months. Multiple friends (and a couple of doctor’s offices) mentioned it often enough that we realized we had a problem. T-Mobile’s great customer service could find nothing wrong and refused to look at the lost calls that originated from other TMO customers.
We have been grandfathered into a Simple Choice Plan for ~13 years and just switched over to whatever their comparable current plan is, and only saved $10 (woohoo). What’d you go with? I was looking into prepaid with Tmo but they’ve been in quite the steady decline for a while now.
Mint works pretty darn well. It’s still using t-mobile towers, but is a whole lot cheaper.
If you have any government assistance programs ) Medicaid, SNAP, etc.), look into the Lifeline program for potentially free cell service:
I switched to Mint a couple years back. It’s fine.
Which company was that? Mint moblie?
US Mobile. Switch was somewhat complicated (for instance you can’t upgrade from one plan to another, unlike most postpaid plans) but once through the startup difficulties they’ve been great. Chat support is especially good.
Its almost like everyone saw this coming once Sprint was allowed to merge with them, and then US Cellular
they all pull this shit… three different providers besides tm here, just in the last 2-3 years.
and they get away with it, so it continues…
Mergers of larger corporations shouldn’t be permitted. In fact, any attempt at initiating a merger should instead initiate a breakup.
Ooh, imagine if Spirit was broken up…
Or Delta or American or United.
This is some straight up MBA enshittificarion. I’m on the military plan with all unlimited yada yada, even then data is throttled down after a certain amount. Waiting for an email that says they’re supporting the troops by increasing the amount we can contribute to the economy or some shit.
Yeah, I’m a bit pissed that the military plan is changing. Bill for me is going up around $20.
Is it? I’m being moved to some new plan that doesn’t seem to actually exist.
They didn’t say in the message what they are moving me to, just that it’s $6 more per line so another $18 per month… This after they ended the autopay discount unless you gave them direct access to your bank account (and for me that would mean losing the phone insurance provided by MC world).
My message says up to $6/line and following the link says I’m being moved to “experience signature” which doesn’t seem to exist anywhere on their website.
And direct access to my bank account isn’t happening, so I never had the auto pay discount.
The same company that told me they would give me a $300 prepaid visa to switch. Then told me I had to stay a customer for 30 days before I would get it. And at 30 days told me I was outside the 30 day window to claim it?
I’m so surprised.
A few years ago I tried to buy a couple of phones at a T-Mobile store and they flatly refused to sell to me unless I purchased their monthly phone insurance. The manager openly admitted he knew the practice was illegal but didn’t care.
The company is also famous for refusing to pay customers trade in value by fraudulently claiming phones have cracked screens and significant damage.
T-Mobile’s been a shit company for years.
In 2025 T-Mobile reported a net income (net profit) of $11.0 billion. Think of the poor shareholders!
Again? Didn’t they do this a couple years ago too?
I stopped using T-Mobile a few months ago. Used to need the Internet while living in a shelter, until I moved into a government funded apartment. I now have TAG Mobile for my phone (free each month w/ 10 gigs of data), and $30/month AT&T 100mb up/down fiber Internet.
Being poor sometimes has advantages.
If you have ANY government assistance program (like SNAP), you qualify for free mobile and reduced cost home Internet.
I thought they ended the reduced home internet program.
I got it from AT&T just a couple months ago. Your mileage may vary, but better to try.
For what it’s worth, y’all, Mint Mobile is pretty great. I actually got an email in December when renewal time came telling me I should downgrade my plan and save money, based on my data usage for 2025.
If you get government assistance, look into free mobile options, like TAG Mobile.
You know all the corporations are now thinking…“The prez lies with immunity. The precedent has been set. Let’s go boys…SELL SELL SELL !!”.
I dunno anyone still using the big 3 telcos, not much value over the MVNOs unless you’re really the type that wants to bundle Disney+ or something.
The big companies give line prio over mvno clients.
telcos
Are we Australians rubbing off on the international English lexicon? I don’t know how to feel about this haha
That’s definitely not new slang. In the US at least.
TIL then I guess. If I imagine someone saying this in a US accent, I just can’t picture it haha
I’ve never heard of ”telco” as a US citizen in my 40s. I’ve heard “telecom” but not “telco”.
Thank you for somewhat restoring my head cannon haha
I got the text today… Our bill will go up an extra $18/month. Great.
That’s the price for Germany World Cup failure.
They do shit like this and get away with it because it’s slim pickings for a plan that has phone, internet, and most importantly no data cap. All carriers suck at one of those three.
I’m using Cricket wireless. $45/mo gets me unlimited internet on my phone with a 15gig hotspot.
I’m all physical media, but if I need to download something, I do it on my phone (sorry, seeders) and transfer it over to my PC to watch on my TV.
Lmao I’m amazed cricket still exists. I remember using their shitty USB internet sticks 15 years ago.
There’s a small profit to be made administering a plan on a common carrier while the bigger operators. rake in the big money from idiots permanently leasing a fucking cell phone.
I’m all physical media, but if I need to download something, I do it on my phone (sorry, seeders) and transfer it over to my PC to watch on my TV.
that sounds like a lot of hassle. why are you downloading on the phone?
The only hassle is the tranfer, and that’s set & forget.
And I don’t spend $50-100/mo (wifi + streaming)to waste time channel surfin.
you can share your phones internet connection (including wifi) with a computer over USB. you need to enable it on the phone. its cool I think. this way you could also be seeding.
on linux, with some distros you need to load a kernel module by hand. for some reason it does not load automatically on some of them. if you are interested I can look up my notes about it
Two things:
Sadly, my USB port completely borked, so that’s off the table. I use KDE-something-or-other to txfr files over my internetless wifi.
Second, I did look into it, and even on my Graphene OS phone, the USB tether is treated identically to the hot spot; that is to say, the carrier can detect you’re connecting a device and there is no workaround other than paying the cellular provider for the privilege of using your connection as they see fit.
and there is no workaround other than paying the cellular provider for the privilege of using your connection as they see fit.
there must be a workaround. I have been seeing solutions for this in the past, but I don’t remember because I haven’t had such a shitty provider.
probably it’s the TTL value in the packets. if you can move the sim card or a clone of it into a portable openwrt router, that’s an easy fix, otherwise it would probably need patching android which you probably can’t do because graphene is too hostile to that.
Anyone upset about this should consider prepaid service. I’ve been on prepaid service (a couple of different companies over the years) for almost 15 years and haven’t had any serious issues.
I have, however saved serious money.
people won’t go on pre-paid service because of the social stigma of it being for ‘poor people’
I’ve been on a 20-25$ cell plan my entire adult life… but it’s Boost, and people think it is ‘ghetto’ due to the fact Boost was originaly marketed as ‘urban’ cell phone company. It’s insane. I even got my mom to switch over to it when she retired to save money. but my sister found out and was RIPSHIT i put my mom on a ‘phone plan for black people’… because she’s racist AF, and she took my mom off the plan and put her back on a $100 Verizon plan again… and bought her a fancy iphone she had no clue how to use, because ‘successful people use iPhones, poor losers use Android phones’.
my plan on Verizon would be like 80 bucks a month. a lot of people take pride in throwing away money because it makes them feel they are ‘not poor’. and marketing loves them.
In other news, my nephew turned 18, wanted to get off the family plan and get his own phone and plan, and wanted Boost w/android because it’s cheap and he can easily afford it. She was furious with him and basically told him he can’t do it, because she’d lose the ability to track him via his iphone, which is precisely why he wants to get rid of being on the family plan… but she tells him he can’t do it because ‘people won’t respect him’ if he has an android and not using Verizon.
Lol like the respect of die hard apple users is worth anything. Something about people being snobby about the shittier option (though Google is doing what it can to catch up in that regard) is hilarious.
Any adult who cares what kind of phone another adult has needs to grow up and get a life.
Glad your nephew thinks for himself.
thinking for yourself isn’t very advantageous when everyone hates you for it.
Is it really everyone in your family or just a few busybodies who bully everyone else into conformity?
In my family it’s the latter but I’ve accepted being the odd one out and being happy instead of being approved of by people who don’t respect my autonomy.
no it’s everyone. my family is small and hyper-conformist. they basically abused their children into conformity. anytime their kids ever wanted to do something ‘weird’ like, not play baseball, they basically abused them back into conformity.
it’s typical american suburbanite ‘normal’. they think i’m a libertine degenerate because I am single and living in a city and drive a small car and eat vegetables.
I’m from small town Oklahoma. I understand the type of people that you describe.
Some of my family is the same way. I, like you decided to live my own life and never had a close relationship with more than a couple of family members.
Hope your nephew is strong enough to withstand the pressure and live his own life when he’s an adult like you have.
I’m still on tracfone (cheap plan) and feel it’s also going to get axed
fyi TF got acquired by Verizon a few years ago, and thus is now a wholly-owned subsidiary, like Visible and Total Wireless
I knew that, but I have a feeling Verizon will push TF users to Visible and shut down TF. There has been issues with other prepaid users who can’t get airtime or minutes without issues.
