Following another quarter of industry-leading customer additions, T-Mobile USA Inc. stepped up the competitive pressure on its larger rivals by introducing aggressive pricing changes to its rate plans.
The most aggressive move was to reintroduce its Get More 1000 plan, which offers 1,000 anytime calling minutes with nationwide long-distance and no roaming anywhere on the carrier’s network for $40 per month. T-Mobile USA and a number of its competitors offered a similar plan during last year’s holiday season, but they were quickly shelved earlier this year.
Analysts warned at the time that those rate plans, which offered subscribers calling rates as low as 4 cents per minute, would pressure existing average revenue per user results by tempting existing high-ARPU customers to select a lower-cost plan and did not provide any incentive for new customers to sign up for a more expensive rate plan.
In addition, T-Mobile USA added unlimited weeknight calling minutes on plans beginning at $40 per month to go along with its previously offered unlimited weekend calling minutes, added hundreds of additional anytime calling minutes on a number of its rate plans, including an additional 1,100 anytime calling minutes to its previous $100 per month for 1,400 minutes plan, and introduced a pair of new rate plans at the $30 and $80 price points.
Overall, the pricing changes thrust T-Mobile USA back to the forefront as the most aggressively priced carrier at most price points with its per-minute charge in some cases more than half of what is being offered by its competitors.
Cingular Wireless L.L.C. and Sprint PCS also recently altered their pricing plans.
Cingular’s changes provide customers with the ability to choose between 5,000 night and weekend calling minutes, 5,000 mobile-to-mobile calling minutes or 50 percent more anytime calling minutes using the carrier’s GSM service, or its slightly more expensive TDMA offerings. The 50-percent more anytime calling minutes drops the carrier’s per-minute pricing to between 6.7 cents per minute on its $30-per-month GSM plans to 3.8 cents per minute on its $200 per month GSM offerings.
Sprint PCS’ changes were limited to its cdma2000 1x-based Vision data offering, where the carrier dropped the price of unlimited access using a PC Card from $120 per month to $80 per month, matching Verizon Wireless’ charge for unlimited access to its 1x-based data service. Sprint PCS’ adjustment came just months after the carrier raised the price for unlimited Vision access from $100.
