T-Mobile Legacy Customers Brace For Forced Plan Migrations With Rate Hikes
In the same interview, however, Samson also asserts that "There's no going back to the old plans, so that's not going to be an option that's available." Allan Samson repeatedly expresses hope that customers will come around and insists that the benefits of the newer plans will outweigh the added cost. One of the main benefits will be to back-end work required whenever new features are added to existing T-Mobile services, since code corresponding to legacy plans will finally be retired.
The reception so far has not been positive, but it's not hard to see what makes it pragmatic. I don't personally endorse it, but I don't doubt that continuing to maintain 3G networks adds complication and overhead when the modern ecosystem is pushing to 5G and beyond. We've already seen compatibility issues on older phones suggesting this to be the case.
The question is to what extent legacy plan users will tolerate a forced plan switch from T-Mobile. From the sound of it, a fair number of people were still quite attached to those 3G and 4G-era data plans, with even early 5G plans to be cut by this move.
Current T-Mobile plans also aren't that unreasonable in comparison to the legacy options. $55 a month for 50GB of data before throttling compares favorably to most competing options, especially legacy ones. Starting at $90, a single user can remove that limit and stream up to 4K, and for plans with multiple lines, per-line cost decreases considerably. If one really wants to optimize it, they'd break up a multi-user plan for every 2 (or 3 in case of a bundle) lines.
T-Mobile's words to Fierce Network are still a pity though, particularly considering T-Mobile's past promises of "lifetime" plans. Forced plan changes after those claims sound awfully close to false advertising, pragmatic or not.
