Nothing spells disaster like a promising courtship gone wrong. Just days after news of Sprint dropping its pursuit of T-Mobile due to regulatory hurdles made the headlines; both mobile carriers are back in the price wars, and this time, with a renewed taste of enmity for each other.
As newly installed Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure launches his aggressive pricing strategy to win over new customers from Sprint's rivals, T-Mobile heaves its own counter-attack with a friend-referral program meant to reward its most loyal customers for convincing their friends and family members to switch over to T-Mobile. The reward? One whole year of unlimited LTE data for free for both the person who referred a new customer and the new customer.
As if that wasn't enough, T-Mobile wants to make its customers cannot say no by offering $25 for every new referral an existing customer says. And for those who are already on unlimited data plans, T-Mobile wants to offer $10 in credit every month for the next 12 months.
"It continues to amaze me to see the old carriers failing to listen to their customers-or reward them for their loyalty," says T-Mobile's firebrand CEO John Legere in his characteristic scathing commentary of his company's rivals and the mobile industry in general. "That arrogance and indifference has defined the U.S. wireless industry for too long. We're changing all that. In fact, this entire Un-carrier consumer movement is built on the simple act of listening to customers."
The move comes just days after Sprint introduced a new $100 shared family plan offering 20GB of data for up to 10 lines and an additional 2GB of data for every line opened with Sprint. Additionally, Sprint also openly took a page out of T-Mobile's playbook by offering to pay early termination fees in a bid to lure customers away from rivals AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile and sign up for its network. Claure is rounding off his rapid-fire succession of reforms for this week with the announcement of a new $60 personal plan offering unlimited data, calling and messaging, effectively undercutting T-Mobile's own unlimited plan by $20.
But T-Mobile is not letting up on its former would-be partner and called out Sprint for failing to provide unlimited LTE data options for its new shared family plan.
"When families exceed their cap - assuming that's even possible on the nation's slowest LTE network - families are hit with overages to the tune of $15 per gigabyte," says T-Mobile in a statement announcing its new referral system. "In stark contrast, T-Mobile's Simple Choice plan comes with unlimited data, talk and text - and with no overages and no annual service contracts - on America's fastest nationwide 4G LTE network."
However, investors apparently see the new Sprint in a positive light, with Sprint shares climbing up to $5.55 a share by 0.9 percent in trading, while T-Mobile's numbers slid by 1.6 percent to $29.21.
