T-Mobile unlimited plans: Forced migration now completely abandoned [U]

Update: In an earnings call, CEO Mike Sievert told investors and analysts that the idea has now been completely abandoned – statement below.

A reported move regarding some older T-Mobile unlimited plans got the carrier into hot water, and the company’s CEO said that it never intended to proceed with this – rather, it was just carrying out a small-scale test. But even the test has now been abandoned …

Official statement

CNET reports that Sievert has now dropped the idea altogether.

With the “plenty of feedback” the company received following the leak, Sievert said that T-Mobile has learned that this “particular test sell isn’t something that our customers are going to love.” He mentioned that no migrations of plans have actually rolled out. 

The reported plan

Internal T-Mobile documents were first leaked on Reddit, with TMO corroborating them.

As first shared on Reddit and separately confirmed by us here at The Mobile Report, T-Mobile plans to automatically migrate customers on older plans to a newer Go5G equivalent plan.

At that point, all we had were leaked documents – but they certainly appeared to be polished customer-facing ones.

But CNET then reported that T-Mobile had confirmed the plan.

The carrier confirmed to CNET that starting next week, notices will be sent out to T-Mobile users on its older One, Simple Choice, Magenta and Magenta 55 Plus plans alerting them that starting with their November bill cycles their respective plans will change and that their monthly pricing will go up. 

Details were also shared on how to opt out of the migration.

T-Mobile denial/back-track

TMO reports T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert now suggesting that this was never a full-on plan, only “a very small test.” He made the claim in a company-wide email.

Last week, some internal training documents were leaked to a website that covers mobile industry updates. The media quickly picked up the information and ran with it, as they often do with leaks. Unfortunately, docs like this – without more context – leave a lot of room for interpretation. In this case, it was largely inaccurate and caused a lot of confusion for our customers (rightfully so!).

I’m sure people are also asking many of you what’s going on. So, I wanted to offer a bit more background to help answer questions you may be getting. First, the biggest piece of missing context was that the leaked materials related to a very small test.

He went on to say that the test would only affect “a small subset of customers who are on older rate plans (some up to a decade old).” This statement doesn’t really mean anything, however, as only a small percentage of customers would have been on these particular plans – so that would be true even if it affected all of them.

While the company still hasn’t commented publicly, Sievert would of course be aware that a company-wide email would be quickly shared with the media.

9to5Mac’s Take

Sievert’s claim may be true. However, given the polished nature of the materials T-Mobile prepared for the migration, and the reported confirmation to CNET, a skeptic might consider it more likely that this was a full-on plan – the company saw the backlash against it and is now thinking again.

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