T-Mobile has some pretty good deals this weekend

@Pantheist
No. must be new lines. Not sure who they will Police this - expect if you drop a line, it will automagically be a free line you drop.

PS you can port from another carrier if you wanna.

@f00l what if you dropped your 2 of your current lines then got two free ones?

@Pantheist you would almost certainly lose your existing numbers.

@jbartus
Might be worth it to lose the phone numbers. Esp for kids phones. Many kids would likely not be too troubled or care that much.

You do have to have 2 lines already active to qualify. And they might have rules.

Fwiw on family plans Tm often has low charges after the 1st 2 lines anyway.

@f00l yep.

I have two 3-in-1 SIM kits on the way to me at no charge. Whether I activate them on Tuesday (when I get them) or not is up to me. They’ll be good for a while. I have four or five decent phones I can use them in, especially if my main goal is a hotspot, say in my car.

I asked “Jessica” (overly perky TMO person) about cancelling one of my three lines and adding the two free lines. She said “no, it doesn’t work that way” and I decided not to argue. (Recall that my main reason for calling was going from 2GB to 6GB. This is because @miraclewhispers (DU2) will be home (well, back in NYC) for good starting in about a month and will actually be able to use 4G (up in Cortland NY, where she has mostly lived for the last 3+ years, there is no 4G so 2GB of data was about 2GB more than she could use). DU1 has plenty of data on her work phone (tho she hesitates to use it for non-work things) but she’s been hitting the 2.5GB limit on TMO under our current plan for a while.

I might use 500MB of data in a busy month. (How much data can one use in 15 minutes, twice a day, four days a week on average, while also driving?)

@baqui63
re data and driving.
If you’re using YouTube red or another streaming service as your music source, or streaming podcasts and audiobooks, all controllable from headset (or, depending on car, steering wheel), can use a lot of data. Am astonished you all use so little.

Salute.

@f00l My daily commute is normally under 30 minutes and I generally listen to the local NPR station (WNYC) when I’m in the car (except when they are doing pledge drives).

My primary use of data (in the car) is Google Maps.

@baqui63
If you are into NPR -

Just found that WBUR (Boston) podcasts Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

The bad - no local news and weather. You can’t get the current show podcast until they complete the initial upload - usually in a few hours after initial program broadcast completes on the East Coast. For instance perhaps 9am for ME? They don’t podcast the weekend news shows.

The good - they keep a week’s worth available for download. You can listen whenever you feel like it. If you download the podcast on wifi, no data charges. You can stream it also. And the biggest deal for me: listen at 1.25 or 1.5 or 2.0 speed (cuts silences). FF and Rew are completely under your control. Use any podcast player. Responds to Bluetooth commands.

I know a bunch of apps stream NPR but this is the only easy way I’ve found to control playback speed and jump forward or back.

@f00l part of why T-Mobile users use so little billable data is they have “free” youtube/Netflix/pandora/lots of other streaming services (bandwidth) it isn’t metered against the data plan. My wife was using 12-20GB/month on at&t moved to T-mobile useage hasn’t changed however billable usage is around 1.2gb. Plus T-Mobile doesn’t charge overages. You just get throttled in speed.

@Star69 Yeah, I’m sure that happens sometimes. But I’ve been with TMO for seven (?) years and it just keeps getting better. In that time I’ve had exactly two Customer Service faux paux:

1. I bought a TMO-compatible tablet offa eBay and TMO refused to unlock it. After a ton of run-around it turned out it was an AT&T tablet that a previous owner hadn’t paid off. I ended up having to pay $15 to one of the thousands of unlock services on the interwebs to get it unlocked. <shrug>
2. I had two of their cell-spot micro towers (one in a summer cabin and the other in our main house) and when the one in the summer cabin crapped out they accidentally deactivated the one in the main house. Not really an end-of-the-world thing, but to re-activate it it needs to be sent back in and they have to issue a new one. So there was a ton of UPS’ing going on until that was sorted out.

Other than those two problems I haven’t had a single problem that couldn’t be sorted out with a phone call or two.
And sometimes they’ve even gone above and beyond. I had a problem with an Apple-Store-issued iPhone that they couldn’t solve (because it was an “Apple” phone) and Apple wouldn’t solve (because it was a “T-Mobile” phone) and their tech support went around back of the computer to do whatever handle-jiggling was required to sort out the problem.
Compared to any other “tech” company’s customer support, I put TMO’s at the top of the list. (Yes, even above AppleCare!)

@Star69 So you found DOZENS of bad comments about t-mobile. I bet I could find dozens of bad comments about verizon, sprint, AT&T and probably even Cellular One.

@mcc Weird that you took the time to comment, but you didn’t read what I wrote: Dozens of people complaining that T-Mobile didn’t live up to the contract that they made, promising to pay ETFs. Everyone gets the same “oh gosh, this NEVER HAPPENS to anyone else” lies and excuses. It appears to be their way of doing business.

@Star69 : https://meh.com/forum/topics/t-mobilehttpwww-t-mobile-com-has-some-pretty-good-deals-this-weekend#5831e1d4be75449400ed9eed

In the our corporate relationship we ran into dishonesty and deception at the TMO corporate level, even reaching to Germany.

Dirt can be found at every carrier, and we dealt with all 4 as a corporate customer. But TMO required by far the most babysitting.

As a corporate customer, AT&T was the easiest to deal with, then VzW (painfully constrained by their Finance guys), then Sprint (nice folks, but they didn’t have the infrastructure to back them up), followed deeply in the basement by TMO.

@Star69 I read what you wrote. Dozens (your word, not mine) of 67 MILLION subscribers had issues. The OP stated that they were not “looking to start (or continue) any arguments about which cell carriers are best.” SO because of your .0001% of their customers complaining you felt the need to do just that. T-mobile either works for you or it does not. It works for us, apparently not for you. I read your post, you apparently took issue with mine, but did you read and understand the first one? My point was that you can find bad comments on most any carrier. That was all.

@mcc I don’t think we’ll ever get anywhere on this. It isn’t a ‘my carrier is better’ argument, it’s a caution that T-Mobile says one thing, and does something else, as their standard operating procedure. My original and subsequent comments were about the most incredibly maddening, frustrating experience I’ve ever had with any company, and that they appear, to me, to engage in making fraudulent offers by not following through with their contractual obligations. In my case it was ETFs refunding in the form of Visa gift cards that I had to fight like hell to make them produce. Obviously they can’t screw every one of their customers, or that’s all they’d be known for, but what is an acceptable level of fraud for a company to engage in before it’s egregious? Zero fraud is the answer. I didn’t do census, or even an exhaustive search, I just found it incredibly easy to find DOZENS of other people who took the time to post exactly the same shitty customer service experience that I received from T-Mobile - You do everything right, and pay your current carrier your ETF to switch to TMO, and they drag their feet with some archaic, crap business methods that look like they are trying to do the wrong thing. You wait 12 weeks or something for your refund, and it never shows up, so you call and they say they’ll fix it, wait another 8 weeks, and they miss that deadline too, rinse and repeat as the mountain of apathy builds. So whether it’s here or some other forum, I’m not going to read a post that says that T-Mobile has some wonderful deal without posting a contrary “buyer beware of deceptive advertising and poor follow through” warning. Their 48 million dollar fine is proof they purposely engage in deception. Are they the only company to do that? Of course not. Look at VW & Audi and their phony emissions software.
Lastly, I’m just following through with the promise I made to the 12th or 15th TMO rep I had to beg for my ETF refund: My whole experience with T-Mobile was a disaster, and I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to tell other people about it. If you use them, and didn’t get the short straw, good for you. As far as I’m concerned, they can fuck themselves to infinity. I went back to my previous carrier, with a $200 rebate incentive, which they paid 3 weeks earlier than promised.

@Star69 And I got my rebate from TMO with out a problem. I have had similar stories to yours with two other carriers. I have had great customer service with TMO, not perfect, but things are usually resolved. Then again, all of these carriers are better than Comcast when it comes to customer service. Just because you had a bad experience, does not mean that is universal.

@mcc Again, and for the last time for me, it goes beyond just me having a bad experience, or you having a good one. It’s indicators that the company engages in fraud, for all of the reasons I’ve already listed in detail, their FCC fines for deceptive unlimited data, and the info other users posted here as well. These are the actions of a shady company. Yes, there are many companies that don’t play by the rules anymore, and I’ll call out any of them that have aggravated me to the degree that T-Mobile did. Had Wells Fargo opened 16 extra accounts in my name I’d probably be calling them out in some bank related forum post that was trying to polish that turd. But they didn’t do that to me, even though I have an account there. In dodging that bullet though, I doubt I’d be inclined to defend them if someone else made a post about what a poor experience they may have had with a bad player. If you’ve had bad experiences with other carriers, post your conflicting views when someone else is singing their praises- as a warning to other buyers to be aware of their shortcomings. If I’ve saved one person from going through the same shitstorm that was my TMO experience, great.

@Star69 @mcc @redoak ive also had nothing but great experiences with tmobile personally. There are 4 of us at work always saying how cheap our bill is and how we’re fans so one guy switched from Verizon and switched back within a week time. He hated the service (both customer and phone).
I also dont care about any alleged wrong doings from the corporation. I just want as much as I can get for a cheap as possible while also getting quality.
This weekend deal has been expanded till Tuesday! I think you can get free tablets too. I’ll probably go check it out

@Star69 every issue I’ve had they have resolved. It took about 4 hours worth of calls to At&T as they double charged me etf fees and then T-Mobile wouldn’t pay it. I had to have At&T send a new bill etc. it was so worth it for me. I’ve been with them over a year now, they bought out 2 brand new contracts- 22 months remaining, 1 that was 11 months remaining, I just did the 3 iPhones free (over 24 months) trading in 3 iPhone 6+'s. And just got a Sync up drive on a free line for free. Plus cut my AT&T bill from $320/month to a T-Mobile bill of $170/month for the year… it’s paid very well to be on T-Mobile for me.
By a quick count it looks like T-Mobile will have saved me $9350 over 3 years over AT&T not including the sync up drive.

@RedOak check out consumer cellular. Painful customer service, but they use att towers and tend to be cheaper

@Pantheist We’re actually pretty happy with AT&T Mobility (AT&T UVerse Internet is another story - we’re about to dump them for Wow!)

Part of my role at the company where I used to work was managing the mobile services team. That meant negotiating corporate contracts with all 4 major providers. (It was painful but very educational.) The resulting employee 22% service discount with zero activation fees takes the financial sting out of our AT&T payment.

@accumulator Our experience - from a corporate perspective - was that TMO is the least professionally managed by far. Chaos & amateur hour. Painful to deal with as a corporate customer.

I get that they’re cheap… and if their network is OK where someone needs it, fine.

@RedOak
If you think TM is badly managed, have you dealt with Sprint?

Although if you are dealing with Sprint’s business dept, diff experience.

@accumulator
When you got to EU and found out, did you just pickup a local SIM to deal with data?

One family friend who travels always buys unlocked dual SIM phones. He uses his real SIM and the local 3G or 4g one.

@f00l I’m guessing the point for @accumulator was that TMO advertised a benefit that appeared to remove the hassle of buying local SIM cards. It would be very nice for a frequent EU traveler.

It appears that benefit isn’t what is implied in the ads.

@f00l somewhere in this chain I described our ranking from a corporate perspective. The Sprint folks were pleasant and mostly professional. But they were not backed up with professional infrastructure.

A colleague at another company believed they had an outstanding $80,000 balance due to Sprint. This was from his records, and in this case it was the landline services, Internet related…which can get extremely complicated to the point where companies hire consultants to deal with it.

He was confident enough that he tried for years to get further info from Sprint and even set up a reserve to pay it in the future.

He never could get anyone at Sprint to close the issue.