T-Mobile’s CES press conference Tuesday night had much promise and Magenta delivered on that promise with a few big punches. One of the Nation’s smallest wireless carriers has been fighting tooth and nail for subscribers and has even gone as far as allowing customers to bring their unlocked Apple iPhones to its network for use on their slower EDGE network, and more recently, its refarmed and faster 1900MHz 3G network. When carriers are fighting for subscribers, they’ll take very drastic steps to bring in new customers and keep existing customers happy. At T-Mobile’s press conference, they appear to be doing just that.
First, the company is making sure that unlimited data never really dies. T-Mobile announced that starting Wednesday, customers will be able to sign up for its Unlimited Nationwide 4G plans without attaching themselves to the commitment of a wireless contract. According to CEO John Legere, the new plans will be available starting at $70 per month, which is notably similar to their current on-contract plan rates. Legere said that customers have taken kindly to the new contract free plans and half of all new activations in December were all off-commitment activations.
To keep up with all of the traffic that T-Mobile hopes to add with its new contract-free plans, the carrier is finally being vocal about when we can plan on seeing an LTE network light up. According to Legere, T-Mobile is just “weeks away” from launching T-Mobile LTE in its first market, Las Vegas, and existing customers with LTE compatible phones will be able to use the LTE network after a carrier distributed software update. Legere did mention that T-Mobile would be launching a revamped Galaxy S III with LTE support specific for T-Mobile. The carrier plans on covering 100 million people with LTE by the middle of 2013.
T-Mobile also announced their brand new HD voice-compatibility nationwide. Prior to T-Mobile’s announcement, Sprint was the only carrier to offer HD Voice calls to customers using compatible phones. On T-Mobile, the Galaxy S III and HTC One S are the only HD Voice compatible devices. We weren’t able to test the quality of T-Mobile’s HD Voice system, but when we tested Sprint’s last summer, there was a clear difference in call quality.
Finally, T-Mobile made brief mention to their new initiative, 4G Connect. T-Mobile will partner with Dell and HP at building in T-Mobile compatible 4G radios into notebooks, tablets, and ultrabooks. According to T-Mobile, customers who purchase 4G Connect enabled devices will be rewarded with a free 200MB of data for either 12 or 24 months, depending on the manufacturer’s selected allowance.
It’s looking like we’ll see a big year from T-Mobile. They’re just about to close on their merger with Metro PCS, which will grant them some more spectrum and much needed subscriber influxes. They’re also scheduled to start selling an unnamed Apple product, but we all know it’s going to be the iPhone, now that its network can efficiently handle the iPhone on its best networks. Apple’s iPhone is expensive for carriers to sell, but the profit margin helps carriers make up those costs pretty quickly. If the iPhone can help T-Mobile turn around its subscriber losses, it’s looking like a win for America’s favorite budget carrier.