T-Mobile is making yet another unpopular change to its policies and promotions
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While T-Mobile's name seemed to be synonymous with value, affordability, and industry competitiveness just a couple of years ago, the "Un-carrier" is finding it mighty difficult nowadays to escape controversy and online vitriol for more than a few weeks in a row.
Everywhere you turn, it appears that Magenta is doing either its customers or employees wrong in some way, hiking fees and monthly prices all over the place, cancelling or changing promotions for the worse, firing people, and not being able to keep user data safe.
Of course, some controversies are more serious than others, and compared to that universally reviled AutoPay discount revision from a couple of months back, for instance, T-Mo's newest policy change looks like a significantly smaller inconvenience for a much lower number of users.
What the operator is essentially doing is seeking new ways to ensure its subscribers keep their money with T-Mobile rather than spending it elsewhere. In order to do that, certain deals that used to qualify for a virtual prepaid Mastercard are now merely eligible for "Magenta" cards.
These can only be used at, you guessed it, Magenta for things like bill payments, equipment purchases, and monthly installments instead of allowing you to buy virtually anything (pun intended) wherever good old fashioned Mastercards are accepted.
While T-Mobile still plans to keep the "traditional" virtual prepaid Mastercard rewards around for certain offers, its network switch deal appears to have already been changed... again as far as its terms and conditions are concerned.
That's right, number port-ins to the "Un-carrier" are now eligible for a $200 "virtual prepaid Mastercard only accepted at T-Mobile", although the good news is that controversial change to this promotion from just last month seems to have been reversed.
Yes, you can once again score up to a $1,000 discount for bringing as many as five lines to T-Mo from a competing carrier, but said discount is now effectively a bill credit, which is also what Verizon and AT&T are currently giving their own network switchers.
What we're basically looking at here is another textbook industry play patented by the traditional US carriers, which T-Mobile used to call "dumb and dumber"... before starting to emulate their behavior and imitate their tricks. Is the latest policy change a big deal? That's for you to decide and us to listen to.
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