Kiss your T-Mobile contract goodbye and say hello to your official, unsubsidized T-Mobile iPhone. At its "Uncarrier" event slated for Tuesday, the telecom will all but surely debut a T-Mobile branded iPhone 5 that will likely run on T-Mobile's 4G LTE network.
T-Mobile's 4G LTE network also hasn't officially launched yet, but it's pretty unthinkable that it wouldn't be part of Tuesday's festivities. The one thing we can definitively confirm, because it happened Sunday night, is that contract-free plans have indeed rolled out.
The particulars are as follows: "Unlimited" talk, text and Web costs $50 for the first line and comes with a 500MB data cap, which is to say, the base "unlimited" data offering is about enough to stream a single movie through the Netflix app. Maybe two. A second line will set you back an additional $30 per month and every line that follows is another $10.
If 500MB doesn't satiate your data hunger, which it really shouldn't — if you bothered shelling out the cash for an iPhone, you can add 2GB at $10 per line. The "per line" wording is significant, if not confusing, because it suggests that family plans will not be sharing a pool of data. Even more confusing, there is a second option for unlimited data at $20 per line, with fine print directly beneath that alludes to a 12GB maximum data pool.
Given the fact that AT&T couldn't even keep up with the bandwidth requirements of a true unlimited data plan, it seems unlikely that the nation's smallest major carrier will be able to do any better, even after its merger with MetroPCS is completed. Color us bemused and skeptical.
There's at least one new feature that's a clear improvement over AT&T's data offerings: tethering comes included with all plans, so you don't need to pay any extra money simply to use your existing data pool on another device.
