T-Mobile Bucks Another Crazy Mobile Phone Trend: Dumps International Roaming Charges

from the well,-look-at-that dept

For pretty much the entire history of the mobile phone business, your choice of service providers was mostly dependent on trying to find the least evil provider. They all played the same awful tricks designed to make you pay more -- and to hate your service provider in the process. Could it possibly be that T-Mobile has finally decided that it's going to become the brand that completely shakes that up? Last year we wrote about the company killing off the abusive practice of long term contracts combined with subsidies that actually made you pay much more for your phone while making people think they were paying less. And now they've hit back on one of the other favorite gouging places for mobile phone carriers: positively insane international roaming fees that resulted in numerous stories of people suddenly receiving bills over $10,000.

T-Mobile's response isn't to just lower the international roaming fees, it's to get rid of them completely, replacing them with free data access in most countries, and relatively cheap phone calls. The free data plan is fairly slow, but you can upgrade to pay for a faster plan at non-crazy rates (about $15/day -- which is actually less than many hotels charge for WiFi). While other mobile carriers have "international plans" it looks like, even if you're paying up for the "higher levels" of service, T-Mobile's plans will come out significantly cheaper than any competitor.

I'm not sure my brain can process the idea of a mobile phone company that doesn't suck and focus on customer disservice over customer utility.

Filed Under: international roaming, mobile phone service
Companies: t-mobile