T-Mobile posed yet another challenge to its competitors during its Uncarrier 8.0 event. The magenta carrier announced a new program called Data Stash, which allows customers to save their total data from month to month, and gives customers a one-time boost of 10GB. Essentially, all T-Mobile customers now have data rollover. CEO John Legere told David Pogue the tagline for Uncarrier 8.0 is this simple: “It’s your data — what you don’t use, you don’t lose.”
“It’s your data — what you don’t use, you don’t lose.”
T-Mobile already stopped charging customers overages on data, added unlimited data to family plans, and unlimited music streaming over data. Now, the Uncarrier will let you stash your data for later, and promises that once you’ve paid for it, you’ll never lose it — that is, so long as you use up your leftovers within the year. Data Stash will automatically become available for free to every T-Mobile customer on the Simple Choice plan with 3GB or more of data for smartphones, but some customers, including voice customers with the minimum 1GB data plans, don’t qualify. In addition, T-Mobile will hand over 10GB of free data to every existing customer with a 4G LTE plan; new customers can also get in on the 10GB deal by signing up before Jan. 1, 2015.
If you don’t manage to use up the 10GB of free data T-Mobile gives you, any unused high-speed data will roll over to the next month. The Uncarrier will even round up to the nearest megabyte, and promises that there’s no limit to how much data you can save for later.
In an interview with Yahoo’s David Pogue, Legere said that around 31 million of the 231 million Americans on post-paid plans pay around $1.5 billion in penalties. In his typical bombastic style, Legere said that this latest Uncarrier promotion is just another attempt to fix this”stupid, broken, arrogant industry.” Legere added that he got the idea of data rollover from two sources: Twitter and Sprint. Twitter users had been complaining about losing the data they paid for, so Legere decided to fix that problem. The 10GB boost was inspired by a sign in a Sprint store that said, “Give the gift of data,” which Legere took quite literally.
“I don’t have any ideas,” Legere said, adding that “everything we do comes from individual customers writing it.”
