So it had everything else, like the lost/stolen, broken, ext. I support this because my last phone had the insurance of $8. Since Jump will only give you at most have of the phones price. Many of you said no to Jump because the fact that you have to pay 50% of the phone to be eligible to trade in, and it is better to sell the phone on your own to cover up the EIP balance and have a little extra money to use for the downpayment of the new phone. insurance on my iP5 and now I have Jump on my iP6. Hat tip to Stetson Doggett for drawing my attention to this topic.I used to have the $8/mo. T-Mobile may have made an honest mistake when coming up with the latest iteration of its plans page. For what it’s worth, I don’t mean to suggest T-Mobile is intentionally hoping to mislead consumers about data priority on the Essentials plan. The way T-Mobile is using the phrase “Premium Data” is going leave consumers confused.
It’s silly to call data “premium” when indicating something like: “data that’s not absolutely the lowest priority in the queue.”Īs I’ve argued before, consumers ought to have access to better information about prioritization and congestion. While Essentials subscribers aren’t truly last in line, only a tiny fraction of T-Mobile subscribers have lower priority (e.g., some ultra-heavy data users and people on hotspot connections). 1 T-Mobile is taking a step back by suggesting the Essentials plan has Premium Data.Īs far as I know, Verizon and AT&T only use the phrase “Premium Data” to mean something like: “data prioritized ahead of the data used by a substantial portion of our other customers.” If my understanding of data prioritization on T-Mobile’s network is accurate, Essentials customers receive priority on-par with or worse than most T-Mobile Prepaid, Metro, and Mint Mobile subscribers.
Until recently, T-Mobile did a better job disclosing prioritization policies than the other major networks. Once T-Mobile started saying Essentials customers have Premium Data, I ran another QCI test on the plan.
In 2020, I found the Essentials plan had a QCI of 7 while the Magenta plan had a QCI of 6 (indicating that the Magenta subscribers have higher-priority data than Essentials subscribers). QCI values indicate how traffic is prioritized on LTE networks. The plans page still has a disclosure explaining that Essentials customers have lower priority than Magenta customers:Įssentials customers may notice speeds lower than other customers and further reduction if using >50GB/mo., due to data prioritization. While T-Mobile updated how plans appear on its website, it doesn’t look like the underlying characteristics of the Essentials plan changed. The image below comes from T-Mobile’s old plans page: That’s not the case.īefore T-Mobile started using the phrase Premium Data, the company made it clear that the Essentials plan had lower priority data than Magenta plans. If you go to T-Mobile’s primary page listing the carrier’s plans, you’ll find a table that lists the allotments of premium data on different plans:Ĭommon sense might lead you to think “Premium Data” means the same thing regardless of what plan the Premium Data is attached to. In the last month, T-Mobile has started using the phrase “Premium Data” as well. Subscribers with Premium Data may experience better speeds than other network users during periods of congestion. For a while now, Verizon and AT&T have used the phrase “Premium Data” to refer to allotments of especially high-priority data.