T-Mobile Uncarrier 13: Company Announces It Will Do Away With Fees For Its Unlimited Plan

T-Mobile CEO John Legere tends to make news every time he talks, and his speech at CES 2017 was no exception. This time, his company is streamlining its unlimited data plans for customers, offering just a single plan while doing away with hidden costs and fees that make the bill more than expected.

Not much will change for existing customers of T-Mobile One, the company's unlimited data plan that it introduced last year—users will still pay $70 for the first line, $50 for a second line, and $20 per additional line up to 10 lines of service.

Where they will notice a difference is when the bill arrives at the end of the month. T-Mobile will do away with the miscellaneous and often vague line-item fees that appear on the monthly statement. Government taxes will be included in the top line price, rather than appearing in addition to the cost of the plan.

According to T-Mobile, consumers fork out about $17 billion a year across all carriers in taxes and fees that go beyond the advertised price for a wireless service plan. Some of those fees like the Federal Universal Service Charge—a government mandated fee charged to carriers to help subsidize the cost of connectivity in rural areas—are not required to be passed on to the consumer but carriers choose to do so anyway.

The change will likely be a welcome one for subscribers to T-Mobile's unlimited data plan T-Mobile One, as they will now pay just the advertised price for the service.

For those who have remained on T-Mobile's cheaper, limited data tiers, the announcement may not come as such a pleasant surprise. While T-Mobile is doing away with unnecessary fees, it's also doing away with those lower cost plans and embracing its single plan strategy.

Starting in January 2017, T-Mobile will shutter its tiered data plans, leaving those who are still paying under $70 a month—the starting price for the a single line on T-Mobile One, the company's only remaining plan—will have to either jump up to the unlimited data service or take a prepaid plan offered through MetroPCS, a subsidiary of T-Mobile.

To entice those users to move to T-Mobile One, the company is offering a $10 credit to all subscribers who stay below 2GB of data usage—the cap that was placed on the company's $60 plan (though users were still able to use data, albeit at a throttled rate, when they exceeded the 2GB cap).

T-Mobile originally announced its unlimited data plan, T-Mobile One, last summer. Shortly after its arrival, the company was found by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to have failed to communicate its data speed policy—albeit for practices unrelated to the T-Mobile One plan—and agreed to pay $48 million in penalties for its inadequate disclosures.

The company now notes that the top 3 percent of data users in a month—which currently sits at about 26GB of data—are subject to having their data usage slowed or "prioritized below" other customers in areas of high network demand.