T-Mobile to end overage fees for its customers, urges other carriers to do the same
The first of T-Mobile’s trio of new Uncarrier announcements was a Simple Starter plan with unlimited talk and text as well as 500MB of LTE data. T-Mo then followed that up with “Operation Tablet Freedom,” which knocks the price of LTE-enabled tablets down to equal their Wi-Fi-only counterparts and also offers 1GB of free data for voice customers. This morning T-Mobile has revealed its final Uncarrier announcement, and the good news is that it’s something that all its customers can benefit from.
T-Mobile has announced that starting in May for bills arriving in June, it will not charge overage fees of any kind. This applies to Simple Choice plans and the Simple Starter plan (neither of which had overages to begin with) as well as older plans.
Along with abolishing overage fees for all of its own customers, T-Mobile is now urging the other three major U.S. carriers to do the same. The magenta operator has launched a Change.org petition with the hashtag “#AbolishOverages” in an effort to get AT&T, Sprint and Verizon to stop charging overage fees for their own subscribers.
Overage fees can be a major pain for wireless customers, especially because they’re often extremely expensive for things like single messages or extra megabytes. T-Mobile’s decision to axe overages completely is a great Uncarrier move, and I’m sure that the Magenta Army is pleased that they’ll no longer have to worry about being hit with those fees.
We’ve seen the other three major U.S. operators emulate several of T-Mobile’s previous Uncarrier moves, like when they each launched their own early upgrade programs similar to T-Mo’s JUMP. It’ll be interesting to see if that trend continues with the latest move, especially now that T-Mobile CEO John Legere is directly calling those carriers out with a petition.
What do you think of this latest Uncarrier announcement? Do you think that AT&T, Sprint and Verizon will follow it by killing off their own overage fees?