Damn that was fun.
With Amazon’s big unveil and our Un-carrier double header, Seattle was the center of the mobile cosmos on Wednesday. A big day for wireless. An even bigger day for wireless customers. I announced not one but two major new programs – Un-carrier 5.0 and 6.0 – which we call T-Mobile Test Drive and Music Freedom.
It turned into a helluva party—with a couple hundred members of the media and a couple thousand T-Mobile customers and employees who bleed magenta in the house. Over the past year, our people have proven they’re the best in the business. And they took the energy in that room into the stratosphere. They rocked the house, and I was proud to celebrate this day with them.
Underlying everything that night was the fact that we’re kicking the competitions’ collective ass on the network front. Our resident network genius – Neville Ray – posted a blog earlier this week that breaks it down. But it boils down to this. They’re old phone company utilities trying to bootstrap their dial-tone networks into the internet age. We’re a mobile internet company. Our network was built different. It was designed data-strong for today’s data-driven generation and concentrated where people most need it.
This isn’t marketing B.S, and you’ll hear us talk a lot more about it. The fact that we have a network purpose-built for data is the fundamental difference between us and them—enabling every disruptive Un-carrier move we’ve made. It’s the difference that enables our customers to use more data, gives them more network capacity per customer, and fuels the nation’s fastest 4G LTE network. It’s the difference that’s enabled us to lead the industry with massive expansions of Wideband LTE and Voice over LTE yesterday. This is all possible because our network can handle it. And this is what allows us to deliver revolutionary new programs like Un-carrier 5.0 and 6.0.
Un-carrier 5.0 T-Mobile Test Drive
The way we buy wireless in this country is patently absurd. So we’re changing it. With T-Mobile Test Drive, you can take our data-strong network for a spin for seven days on Apple’s latest, greatest iPhone – the iPhone 5s. There’s no cost. No hidden fees. No obligation. And no more buying blind. I want you to know our network will work for you and your family – at home, at work, at school and everywhere in between –before you make a decision. I want you to experience our kick-ass network for yourself. You can pre-register now or order your test drive starting Monday, June 23 at t-mobile.com/testdrive. More than 12,000 people have already signed up to start cheating on their carrier. (Note to self: call Apple for more iPhones.)
Un-carrier 6.0 Music Freedom
Now, Simple Choice customers can stream all you want on all of the top music services – including Pandora, Rhapsody, iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, Slacker Radio and Spotify – without any fear of eating up your data or running up overages. And this is just the start. This one’s personal for me—I want to set them all free, and stop the carriers from using the music you love as another way to rack up overage fees and push you into paying more. Any music service can work with us to be included. Vote on which services to add next at t-mobile.com/musicfreedom. Or tweet the name of your favorite music service to @TMobile with the hashtag #musicfreedom. We’ve gotten over 75,000 votes so far with Google Access Music & XBox Music duking it out for the lead.
And, we joined with our cross-town friends at Rhapsody to launch an Internet radio service so unlike anything else out there that it could only be called one thing—unRadio. It’s Un-carrier’s spin on Internet radio. And it’s available to customers with our newest Simple Choice unlimited 4G LTE service at absolutely no extra charge and at a discount to other customers. Sign-ups are going gangbusters, and we’ll have more to share there soon. You can learn more here.
And by the way, we aren’t done. Un-carrier 7.0 isn’t far off. This is one we’ve been working on for a while. And, believe me, it’s going to be good. We won’t stop.
John