T-Mobile President and CEO John Legere wants basic phone plans to be uncomplicated and act as more than just a gateway to higher-priced options, according to a new blog post from the often outspoken figure announcing his company’s new Simple Starter pricing plan. The Simple Starter plan is just $40 per month, and includes unlimited talk and text plus 500 MB of monthly data usage.
Those details aren’t things you’d learn from Legere’s blog post announcing the news, nor would you glean that the plan is specifically designed to avoid automatically incurring high overage chargers for customers who go over that 500 MB limit. Instead, Legere mostly goes on a run about AT&T and its fairly obvious attempts to steal some of T-Mobile’s momentum by copying its recent pricing model changes, and even, Legere suggests, its trademark magenta color scheme.
For the curious, how the new plan handles overages is actually by alerting customers when they hit their limit and offering them day or week data passes, or prompting them to sign up for different monthly plans. Users won’t be charged anything automatically, however, unlike with the so-called “flexible” options of their competitors.
T-Mo is getting lots of due credit for its attempts to change some of the basic home truths in the mobile industry, and has two more announcements planned over the next two days that should offer some more in the way of shake-ups. And sure, big blue and the rest might just get copying again, but that’s a general win for consumers either way.