Posted by rntn 10/23/2024
Many of us stuck it out with T-Mobile plans despite better options at the time because we're okay paying more now in return for a guarantee of not paying more later.
If T-Mobile is not honoring this once it no longer benefits them, a minimum penalty should be the price difference between T-Mobile and the cheapest similar option over the lifetime of the plan.
If I paid $50/month, and there was a $30/month option through Mint, MetroPCS, etc. for four years with the same data / talk limit, I should get back a minimum of 48 months * $20 ≈ $1000 (increased by a bit, assuming money was held in an index fund in the meantime).
Part of the reason this matters is many companies use similar lifetime tactics to get started. Nebula has $300 lifetime plans, which provided much of the early capital they needed. If this doesn't work anymore, it pisses in the pool for everyone wanting to do something similar.
It's perfectly fine to have early customers fund you with (eventually money-losing) lifetime plans, to buy marketshare this way, etc. There are a lot of business models which go away if this can't be relied on.
The FTC has been growing some teeth again, and needs to stay vigilant.
1. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/01/are-you-for...
A "lifetime warranty" often refers to the "lifetime" of the product, not your lifetime or the expected lifetime of any person.
In that sense, T-Mobile has played this pretty straight. Customers got a price lock for the lifetime of the offer.
Just on a quick read, it looks like a "lifetime warranty" must actually define a length of time though. Which for a product you can, at least claim to, stress test or base on the weakest component.
I'll give another example of how it might not be:
Google is intentionally screwing around with customers who signed up for an email account with their own domain. This gradually evolved into GSuite/free, Google Workspace, and Google has, at times threatened to wipe out accounts unless people paid, broken services, quite often very intentionally, etc.
Simply harassing people into paying should not be legal. There's a threshold somewhere, but OP should be able to e.g. pay extra on top of the free plan for more storage without giving up the baseline free plan.
It's also bad business. Google lost millions of dollars of business that way, on me, personally. I've had enough bad experiences with Google that I always advise people against doing business with Google. If Google had killed GSuite/free and wiped out my data, it'd be very visible (blog posts and the like), but where we are, it's discreet. If things like my GSuite account continued working, I'd be promoting Google like I used to when it was a quirky don't-be-evil company.
Right now, the things which bug me most: They need to fix Google Voice and enable paying for Google One on individual accounts.
Oh, and on the topic of Google Voice, my landline is about to break as Google just broke Obihai support....
There are a lot of economic texts which talk about how being able to have social capital, defined as for example being able to rely on promises, helps grow economies. Landes is a good example.
The backstory is that the company was sold, but I don’t think that’s an excuse. If a buyer is allowed to purchase the business and keep the name and customers, they should take on the previous obligations. Otherwise, they should call it something else or make customers re-register.
I never paid so I'm not really that surprised but it was a quick about-face.
They offered it for over 6 years, beginning in May of 2015[0] and ending in June of 2021, with previously-uploaded photos remaining free still today, and they gave ~7 months of warning before changing things[1].
0: https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/google-photos-breaks-free-...
1: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/11/21560810/google-photos-u...
Which is awesome because I have way more than my drive quota in there.
However it does make me wonder if california's consumer privacy act would cover the right to retrieve photographic data such as this.
Of course, most “unlimited” things are impractical from a business point of view. But I think the burden of dealing with this should fall on the companies making unrealistic promises rather than on the customers.
I've let my card lapse on it for a few months and they never deleted anything (I just hadn't been posting either).
If I have 100M users paying $10/mo on an estimated 3 year term, I have essentially $30B revenue spread over 100M not-quite-contracts and can largely ignore any simgle one of them. But over in B2B, if I sold a $30B contract to a customer, you can be very sure the lawyering would be top notch and airtight. This is why regulators like the FTC and concepts like class action are so useful..and so disliked by corporations. I already note the vitriol directed at Lina Khan at the FTC for example.
I'm fine with regulators punishing companies for misleading advertising or not fulfilling their obligations, buy as savvy consumers, we have to also realize forever deals are too good to be true.
They haven't fully replaced the product, but what is cool is that they have a repair shop that has been doing free repairs for me. I've sent a very lightweight, very heavily used puffy jacket in twice for repairs at no charge.
Realistically I know that jacket isn't going to last forever, but I respect they are at least trying to help me extract as much life out of it as I can from a sustainability perspective.
If replacement is cheaper only because of geographic differences in wages, then we ought to repair. But if replacement is cheaper because of streamlining the use of nonrenewable electricity and so forth, then we ought to replace.
I sent back a down jacket which weighed practically nothing and packed down extremely small. However, harvesting the down is somewhat controversial and only recently has there been a movement to use ethically-sourced down feathers (I haven’t looked into the RDS standard. I’m sure it has problems, but hey, it’s a step in the right direction).
For normal fabric clothing, I think you are probably right. I do feel like the roundtrip in this case was worth it to get the most usage out of the feathers as possible (not to mention the 1000+ fill jackets like this are expensive).
I don't get it. Shouldn't it be the seller's obligation to give a reasonable lifetime estimate? Like, give me a five year warranty, if you want to advertise your socks last for five years of regular use. Don't pretend it's unlimited when it isn't.
Not sure how you define this or maintain it. These socks are guaranteed for 100 wears? Can't count wears. These socks last a year. Is that daily wear? One of 10 pairs? Only air dried? Was the user running daily marathons?
You can extend this to pretty much every product.
>last for five years of regular use.
What's regular use?
Eventually I try to update it and it says "oh no, do you want to buy a map!?". I mean. What? Doesn't even cost anything to the company to keep on giving me free maps - well I guess it's lost revenue if that they could earn by dishonoring the agreement, which is what they did. Clearly meant to extract more money from me in map purchase or to buy another "lifetime" map.
I have another TomTom on my other vehicle (despite the shitty practices, their kit doesn't randomly crash like Garmin in my experience) which about every 2 days nags me about an update. So here I am, newer model is way too aggressive with updates all the time, old "lifetime map" model is a disaster.
What it is here, is there needs to be legislation that if a company uses "lifetime" or equivalent word in marketing, they are on the hook for life to honor that, with some prescribed action to make customers whole if they should want to drop it.
Now a good guy legend in this field, craftsman tools, for many decades in america people would buy craftsman from their sears knowing they could always go back easily and get a replacement. Sears in the day was like if Wal mart and amazon was the same company. An institution.
I've taken multiple 10 year old T-Shirts with holes through 10% of them in to the Patagonia store and they've let me walk out with new product off the rack.
I had a defective ATX psu cable and MSI support sent me a whole cables kit overnight. And recently a bought a Corsair case, the iCue controller had 2 defective ports and Corsair also sent me a replacement overnight.
My only "trick" with support is telling them upfront that I will leave a 5 stars review on amazon uppon successful resolution of the problem.
I don't think that the soles should just fall off your boots one day while you're hiking, so no, I was not completely satisfied and I would like them to glue the soles back on for me.
I'm sad to hear the bulletproof policy has come to an end.
I think Leatherman have a similar warranty to Zippo, and they've been around a while, too.
Seriously though, this is one of the things that we need strong consumer protections for.
People used social proof of Tmobile's lifetime pricing for years. Then new management comes in, and they can renege on existing contracts?
That should be illegal unless you think contracts are BS too.
But if I read that correctly that they specifically marketed that to retired people or close to retiring... it kinda sounds different. 55 to 75 (or whatever the average lifespan was when this was up), you might want to think they thought this through. Lifelong rental agreements after selling your property are not uncommon in some countries, and you should know that you're gambling.
It's one of those tiny costs that ultimately don't matter, "the principle" of it is sometimes not worth it to me to do anything about. VPN is a generally scummy business from what I can tell.
Scammers always have an out too... go out of business and setup shop under a different name. I remember hearing a local tire shop offering some type of "tires for life" deal. They went "out of business" and the owners started a new shop.
Ok so maybe someone might bite maybe but seems so so unlikely if they can't use the spectrum in any popular spaces!
Structurally this spectrum auction had these conditions, these requirements to deploy broadly, for very obvious reasons. T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting. They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this.
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/t-mobile-relinquishes-mmwave...
I've been saying this for years about DISH, they sat on nationwide mid-band AWS spectrum for something like a decade with only a single tower built in Colorado. They only started a network buildout after T-Mobile was forced to make concessions during Sprint merger. This is super useful/valuable spectrum in the 1.6/2.1ghz range, and it was just wasted. They also bid on 600mhz licenses they couldn't use and acted like the good guys when they leased it to other carriers during COVID.
The BRS/EBS (2.5ghz, band 41) spectrum was similarly a mess. The government gave tons of it to schools and nonprofits that would never use it, never had a need for it. They turned around and started their own market to license it out to companies that actually deployed it for LTE and 5G. In my area T-Mobile deployed more of this spectrum than the backhaul can even deliver. I can easily hit 1.4gbps between a few towers, 700mbps off a single tower (because that's the theoretical max after overhead on a 1gbps port). It's possible there's an argument to be made they were hoarding this, but they built it out, it's on-air and usable.
> T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting.
mmwave spectrum is just.... not that valuable? From a physics perspective it's blocked by too much and requires too much density to get effective deployment. They had a prior history of deploying tons of it, just not on the panels, they deployed it as radio backhaul between the towers in areas where fiber wasn't available. This spectrum should probably get light-licensed/flex-licensed because it's only really going to be needed/used in the most dense urban areas and for radio backhaul in challenging terrain.
In my area, Verizon used some pandemic emergency order to drop mmWave poles all over the place, including in the middle of sidewalks and within a few feet of existing poles. They did it at a frenzy pace, and to date haven’t turned any of them on.
It's not usable spectrum for mass deployment.
AT&T deployed in Baltimore. Verizon and TMobile in Manhattan, and I know Vz used Schenectady, NY as a pilot city.
But part of this article implies that the FAQ was not there at the time of signing up. First I am curious if this is actually true?
If it is, does tmobile have any way of tracking the state of FAQ, contracts, etc at the time of signup instead of just the current version?
Clearly the comments made by the CEO about being an "uncarrier" is plain crap if they pull stuff like this.
When I first saw this I did not think about those that financed their phones through the carrier. That is a pretty horrible situation. Good idea to avoid financing through the carrier anyways and ideally hope the manufacture (like Apple) can do it.
As the article reports, this is what the terms valid at the time said: “If you are on a price-lock guaranteed Rate Plan, we will not increase your monthly recurring Service charge ('Recurring Charge') for the period that applies to your Rate Plan, or, if no specific period applies, for as long as you continuously remain a customer in good standing on a qualifying Rate Plan.”
That’s a pretty massive screw-up on the part of T-Mobile’s legal department. I sure hope this helps the affected customers.
Months later my first bill came and they only increased the price on two apple watch lines by $2 a month each so $4 per month increase on a monthly bill in the hundreds. Seemed rather silly actually as I thought I would be paying $40-50 a month more like the someone in the article described.
I thought I would have a much bigger increase, so clearly they have the ability to track which contracts were valid during the period of sign up and that’s encoded into their billing system.
Turns out after he doesn't even honor that. I bought a year, and then he won't archive the older versions. Have a broken copy because his api key internally broke? Didn't download all versions during that year.. yea you're shit out of luck.