T-Mobile has repeatedly used the fact that the company still offers unlimited mobile data a selling point when mocking both AT&T and Verizon and their usage allotments. But in recent months the company has slowly but surely bumped the price of unlimited data. Last fall T-Mobile held yet another major "uncarrier" PR event, during which it apparently forgot to mention its unlimited plans would be bumped from $80 to $95 per month.
Speaking to investors at a recent Deutsche Bank conference, T-mobile CFO Braxton Carter bragged about the rate hikes, and indicated the company was hoping to "pivot away from" unlimited data.
"In regards to our unlimited promotion, it is a promotion – it's very short time, we pivoted away from using unlimited as our primary promotion mechanism in the prior year and part of what we did with Binge On again was another substantial increase in the price of unlimited," stated Carter.
Binge On of course is a controversial T-Mobile program that "zero rates" (read: makes cap exempt) the biggest video services. But in doing so T-Mobile is technically throttling all video services back to 1.5 Mbps by default, regardless of whether that content's being streamed or directly downloaded. Hand in hand with price hikes, that's gone a long way in making unlimited data more economical.
For now. But Wall Street's demand for quarter-over-quarter improvements is unrelenting.
Binge on "afforded us an opportunity to continue to monetize the investment that we're making in the network and we did our second price increase in two years on unlimited. Unlimited is now $25 more expensive than it was two years ago," Carter told attendees.
Often companies speak candidly at investor conferences, forgetting that the media can still hear them. Executives will also tell attendees of such conferences precisely what they want to hear, and what wireless investors want to hear is that you're charging more money for the same product. But Braxton's comments remain interesting in that he strongly suggests T-Mobile is moving away from unlimited data altogether.
"We have and continue to have a strategy of pivoting away from unlimited, and again I'll point to the $25 price increase, two times over the last two years," said the CFO.
