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« Phila. Council Approves Wi-Fi Contracts | Main | Finnish Voice/TV/Broadband Provider Picks Ruckus »
T-Mobile now bundles unlimited Wi-Fi and unlimited GPRS/EDGE for just $29.99 per month for voice subscribers: I don’t know when these charges changed, but my friend and colleague Steve Manes, Forbes Magazine’s technology columnist, mentioned this in passing in a phone call today. He’d been trying to renew his Treo service with T-Mobile when his old unit died and was told about this new deal.
I tried to find any announcement about this or any coverage, and bupkes. It’s possible it flew under the radar. But it’s a great deal. While GPRS runs at modem speeds downstream and usually less upstream, EDGE can provide a consistent rate of over 100 Kbps down and about half up. Coupled with Wi-Fi, for the right kind of business traveler or college student, this is a very inexpensive alternative for ubiquitous access.
The T-Mobile Internet plan requires a phone purchase, so make sure you get an EDGE capable phone through which to use the 2.5G service.
Posted by Glennf at May 15, 2006 1:22 PM
Categories: 2.5G and 3G, Deals, Hot Spot
TrackBack URL for this entry:
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I usually get 78-180 k on a Sony Ericsson GC82. I have it connected to a 7db antenna that I purchased off eBay. It is decent connection not broadband but a little better than dial up. I am about a mile from a t-mobile cell tower in Houston.
Posted by: mullingar at May 29, 2006 12:23 PM
What ever gave you the idea that EDGE will give you 100 kbps consistently? You are lucky to get even half that in sustained throughput due to erratic latency and other factors.
[Editor's Note: Consistent is maybe an overstatement. Reports I've read indicate that you can't reach a sustained speed of nearly 150 Kpbs, but you can achieve an average rate of about 100 Kbps. Mileage always varies.-gf]
Posted by: Zed at May 25, 2006 8:15 AM
The $20 unlimited GPRS/EDGE plan had been around for quite a while. There was also a $20/mo wifi plan. With the advent of the MDA/SDA phones it seems that plans were merged into a single $30 plan for both.
As you mentioned, T-Mobile HotSpot has released their subscriber data in the past and there had been what I would consider a large number of subsceibers.
(Caveat, I used to work for T-Mobile and lead the wifi architecture team.)
Posted by: David at May 16, 2006 9:46 AM
Effectively they raised the price of unlimited data by $10 (or $20 without voice) and tied it with a service that wasn't selling (WiFi).
[Editor's note: Excellent comment! However, I dig some digging and found that the price has been $30/month for unlimited data for some time. I know that some people were paying $20/month, including Steve Manes, but it's unclear whether the $30/month rate was regular or a promotion or simply grandfathered.
As for T-Mobile's Wi-Fi not selling, they regularly provide usage statistics, and it's hard to know what "successful" is, but if you back out the number they provide, they seem to have very reasonable paid use across the network. --gf]
Posted by: Bryce at May 15, 2006 1:38 PM