Taking a page from AT&T's history book, T-Mobile will let
subscribers roll over their unused wireless data each month, its
latest move in the industry's escalating price war.
The move takes aim at efforts by market leaders AT&T and
Verizon to charge their subscribers more as their data use goes up.
Both carriers have moved their customers away from unlimited data
plans to ones that get more costly as data allotments increase, a
key to their plans for squeezing more growth out of a market where
most people already have smartphones.
The move harks back to an earlier era when cellphone users had
to carefully keep track of their voice minutes. At the time, one of
AT&T's predecessor companies, Cingular Wireless, capitalized by
letting subscribers roll over their voice minutes.
T-Mobile's announcement Tuesday comes a week after AT&T and
Verizon warned that the cost of keeping up with rivals' promotions
is hitting their bottom lines. Competition from T-Mobile and more
recently Sprint is making them work harder to keep their wireless
subscriber counts growing.
In October, T-Mobile raised its projection for postpaid net
additions for 2014 to a range of 4.3 million to 4.7 million, up
from a previous estimate of 3 million to 3.5 million. The carrier
has added more than 5.6 million customers since the beginning of
2013, in a saturated industry with little real subscriber
growth.
The carrier's latest move, called Data Stash, lets people roll
over their unused data for up to a year beginning next month. The
plan applies to postpaid customers on the company's Simple Choice
plans who have a smartphone plan with 3 gigabytes or more of
high-speed data, or a tablet plan with 1 gigabyte or more.
T-Mobile is starting people with 10 gigabytes per line in their
reserve, and data begins rolling over when that initial allotment
is used.
AT&T, Verizon and Sprint offered subscribers extra data on
many plans earlier this year as a way to make them more attractive
for subscribers without cutting prices further. In many cases, the
plans offered far more data than typical subscribers use.
Write to Thomas Gryta at thomas.gryta@wsj.com
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