How T-Mobile Plans To Become Your ‘Fave’
For years cellular industry watchers have loved to speculate about what’s up with T-Mobile. When competitor Sprint merged with Nextel and Cingular swallowed up AT&T Wireless, some thought T-Mobile would be next - that its parent company Deutsche Telecom wasn’t willing to make the investments necessary to compete with Verizon Wireless, Cingular and Sprint Nextel.
No one’s saying that now - especially after T-Mobile put up $4.2 billion in FCC auctions last month for new bandwidth.
T-Mobile is busy making more headlines, laying out plans for a long term future in the U.S. marketplace. Start with myFaves - T-Mobile’s new collection of calling plans, that give you unlimited nationwide calling to your “five favorite people”, no matter what cellular network or landline provider they use. There’s lots of fine print, including no unlimited calls to 800 or 900 numbers; and you have to have a handset that’s designed to be enabled for the program.
Now it’s reported by sources close to T-Mobile that the company will announce Friday its plans for UMTS service. T-Mobile will take its new frequency space bought at the FCC auctions to activate phones capable of super-high-speed data (we’re talking DSL speeds). But the rollout will probably take a year and a half to complete.
And there are new handsets coming - like the HTC Excalibur (pictured), another would-be Motorola Q-killer, which is rumored to be rolling out on T-Mobile October 10. And there are the rumors about a nationwide rollout of the UMA (mobile/WiFi) service T-Mobile has been testing in very limited markets.
Will it be enough to make us forget about T-Mobile dumping Catherine Zeta-Jones as its official spokesbabe? We’ll see.
October 5th, 2006 at 11:53 am
[...] The rollout is timed to coincide with T-Mobile’s new myFaves calling plans. Each of these phones is enabled to let you opt for one of these calling plans, and then choose the five phone numbers in the U.S. you call the most - to get unlimited calling to those numbers. [...]
October 11th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
[...] T-Mobile’s PR machine is now putting HTC’s new Dash (a.k.a. Excalibur) into the hands of reviewers like Gary Krakow at MSNBC. As if they were available. They’re not yet, at least not on T-Mobile’s website. But by the time you read this, they may show up. [...]