Tag Archives: prepaid phone service

Home Phone, T-Mobile

T-Mobile to Increase Monthly Customer Fees from 10th June

Leave a comment

T Mobile home phone service
With another round of news, the growing mobile and home phone service provider – T-Mobile – has made it to the headlines, again.

According to the T-Mobile, the company has incurred certain losses in the past and is carrying them forward till the present day. Thus, to recover from these losses, T-Mobile has decided to increase some monthly customer fees, the next month.

The Announcement

The mobile and prepaid phone service provider made an announcement recently, to increase certain monthly fee charges for its customers. The increase in the fees is going to affect a number of T-Mobile customers.

With effect from 10th June 2017, a few select T-Mobile accounts will face an increase in the Regulatory Programs & Telco Recovery Fee.

The increase in the fee would be from $2.71 to $3.18 for the voice lines and from $0.98 t0 $1.16 for the data lines.

The customers using the T-Mobile ONE Taxes & Fees Included plan are, however, unaffected by this change. But all other customers of the prepaid phone service provider, come in the loop.

As per T-Mobile, the former customers of the SunCom Wireless were exempted from this fee but now, with the increase in the fee, these customers are also going to pay it. It is only if they’re not using the T-Mobile ONE Taxes & Fees Included plan.

SunCom is a wireless carrier based in Pennsylvania that was acquired by T-Mobile in 2008 for an amount of $1.6 billion.

According to T-Mobile, a growing mobile and home phone service provider, the changes in the fee structure for its services are based on the cost structure of its third-party services and that of the government program compliance. The changes are said to be a part of T-Mobile’s standard price adjustments.

The company said that it regularly reviews the related compliance costs of its services and adjusts the customer fees in accordance with these changes, charging the customers accurately as per their choice of plan.

The T-Mobile officials said, “This is not a government tax, rather a fee collected and retained by T-Mobile to help recover certain costs we have already incurred and continue to incur. It includes: 1) Funding and complying with government mandates, programs, and obligations, like E911 or local number portability ($0.60 of the total charge for voice lines and $0.15 for data only lines), and 2) Charges imposed on T-Mobile by other carriers for the delivery of calls from our customers to theirs, and by third parties for certain network facilities and services we purchase to provide you with service (Up until 6/10/2017, it will be $2.11 of the total charge for voice lines or $0.83 for data only lines; From 6/10/2017 on it will be $2.58 of the total charge for voice lines or $1.01 for data only lines).”

Thus, the increase in the customer fee by the home phone and prepaid phone service provider must not be mistaken for the government taxes or fees as the money is to be retained by the service provider, itself.

In a Nutshell

T-Mobile has planned to increase certain monthly fees for its customers, implementing from June 10. The idea behind such increase in the customer fees is to make up for the losses being continuously incurred by the mobile and home phone service provider.

A number of customers will be affected by this change, except for the ones that have opted for the T-Mobile ONE Taxes & Fees Included plan. So, we’re to see if T-Mobile has made its way to healing from the previous losses or to incur more of them.

Home Phone

Landlines vs. Cellphones: To have or not to have?

Leave a comment

home phone service

We are a nation today that functions efficiently because of being ‘connected’ at all times. Aside from the more important study and work related calls, you are available when even your grandmother is texting. No matter what the mode of communication, people nowadays seem to be available around the clock! But with consumers skeptical about spending money on anything more the basic requirements, we tend to question on the need to possess multiple modes of communication. In such times, we ask ourselves: do we really need a landline phone while already possessing a cellphone?

Here are three reasons against pulling the plug:

  1. 911 location tracking. If a call is made from a residential phone, the dispatch centers can find the exact address where landline calls originated. With wireless phones, emergency responders can only figure out an approximate latitude and longitude of those phones. The problem seems small on the face value but is actually not. In emergencies, for instance, when someone needs assistance because they are having a heart attack in their apartment, even if the dispatch center nails their cellphone’s location, it won’t make out which floor the patient was calling from.
  1. More reliability. Living in this age, we all know the feeling of having an important call dropped, mid-sentence, due to a poor cellphone signal. Home phones do not leave you in the lurch.
  1. No running out of charge. You know your mobile handset needs charging but you miss doing the task and the result is your device ditches you right when you need it the most. The reason is lack of attention in our hectic schedules. No matter how dear we hold our cellphones in our bags, pockets, and purses, the fact remains that they can’t stay there forever. We claim these phones to be portable but they become as stationary as a landline when plugged in for charging and even worse, they become as useless as a brick when they run out of battery power!

Yet, we hesitate to say chuck one of the devices entirely. Thanks to the recent convergence of technology between landlines and cellphones, phones have gone a technological step higher with the ‘Connect to Cell’ technology. For anyone who wants the best of both worlds, this is one answer.

So, if you’re seriously entertaining the idea of going solely mobile, remember that it may not be time to cut the land-line cord just yet.