Few people pencil it out and realize that it is often times cheaper to cancel, pay the fee/penalty and go with another carrier. How can this be?

1. If going with T-Mo, for example, over the life of a contract will save far more money than the penalty paid.

2. Instead of paying a higher price for a phone with the current carrier, often times a different carrier will give a free or severely discounted phone for someone to jump ship. So that amount has to be calculated into the cost of switching.

3. Some carriers have even paid fees to motivate someone to switch. But that is not that common.

4. Lastly, carriers are moving to the proration rule, where the longer one is on contract, the less of the fee or penalty that has to be paid.

Just saying. I don’t think the penalty is assessed to recoup costs of phones, it’s to keep people from switching by getting them all caught up in avoiding paying a fine or penalty rather than calculating and discovering that it’s a better deal to break the contract.

When I signed up for it (when I called on another issue) the rep said “you have been flagged for us to offer the loyalty plan).

He made a point of saying there was no contract tied to it.

By the way, while that sound nice of T-Mo to do it that way, the real reason they did not do that per a contract was so that THEY could yank the pricing. I remember when he said there was no contract agreement I said to myself that I would prefer a contract so to LOCK T-MO INTO SUCH A GREAT DEAL. LOL. (mine is two lines unlimited blah blahing for $90 a month).

As to phones, when I get them at the contract price that does NOT obligate me to a particular plan price (see above), it only obligates me to stay with T-Mo (that I have no problem with since I love T-Mo. They have always been good to me in the six years I have been with them).

Sidenote: I hear the TP2 will be $250 with a two year contract since T-Mo considers it a high end phone. $500 w/o contract. Don’t know how accurate that is.

Different phones, for sure. I LOVE the G1 and it’s Android apps. But the TP2 has the ability to open MS Office programs/files which I also like (and need).

Also, at the official T-Mo forums there is a member who posted that he has the TP2 and has been using it for two weeks. He likes it. He also has a G1 to compare it with.

I asked him for further info.

Here is the link:

http://forums.t-mobile.com/tmbl/board/message?board.id=07&thread.id=563

Let me know if you are getting a better deal. If so, I’m dialing 611.

Thanks for the help.

Sorry about that CSR you spoke with Print on 042410, the
loyalty plan did not require an agreement. In most cases
especially with promotional plans, there would be an
agreement. However, the loyalty plan offer was an exception to this but would explain the CSR’s mistake.

JB6464, The loyalty plan is a voice plan that did not require agreement. Upgrades, purchasing a new phone at a dicount, is an inteirely seperate ballgame. So im not saying there is not agreement require while ON the lyalty plan, im state there is no agreement require to migrate TO the loyalty plan. Hope this clears that up for you.