As the dust settles from T-Mobile's announcement yesterday that a new, unlimited video streaming option is being created on their network called Binge On, more details about other changes T-Mobile is making to their business have started to emerge. Among the changes, T-Mobile is going to be hiking the price of their unlimited data plans while expanding the data cap before the plans kick down to a slower speed.
Currently T-Mobile customers with an unlimited data plan pay $80 per month, but they will see that price jump up to $95 per month. To help smooth things over a bit, T-Mobile is doubling the data limit from 7GB to 14GB for hotspot data before connections get throttled down. Clint Patterson, a spokesman for T-Mobile, says, “delivering unlimited LTE plans is expensive as data usage skyrockets, so we're updating Simple Choice to reflect today's usage patterns.”
The changes are not limited to the unlimited plans either. A current two person family plan which includes 10GB of data per line will see a price hike from $100 per month to $120 per month. Individual plans like the 3GB plan for $60 per month is going up to $65 per month, but data is doubling to 6GB. The $70 per month 5GB plan will remain at the same price, but see data doubled to 10GB.
Analysts looking at T-Mobile's new Binge On offer noted a couple issues related to the service. First, T-Mobile is only making Binge On available to customers who have 6GB or higher plans, which may help entice customers to upgrade. The Binge One offering is also limited to video quality of 480p, which uses about a third of the data that current 1080p high definition video consumes. This should help ease network demands for T-Mobile even with more users accessing video content.
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source: CNN Money
