T-Mobile CFO Says iPhone Price Drop Planned All Along, Las Vegas Market First To Join MetroPCS Spectrum

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Speaking at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom conference earlier this morning, T-Mobile’s CFO Braxton Carter touched on the company’s new iPhone 5 pricing. In fact, according to Carter this was T-Mobile’s plan all along.

“When we look at the overall landscape, there’s no need to continue with the initial promotional pricing we had with the iPhone…it was a planned promotion for a very limited of time to create momentum.”

What disappoints me is how this wasn’t mentioned when it was announced, put on pre-order, released or when the company announced “gangbuster” sales. Not a single mention about the pricing being limited-time. No fanfare was given for the price increase and one might think that T-Mobile would want to play up the limited time pricing promotion to drive as much business as possible inside that 30 day timeframe.

This is so very UNcarrier of T-Mobile and it wouldn’t be right to say the company was vocal about this from the get-go. Smartphone prices rise and fall, I get that, but what bothers me about this is how T-Mobile is acting so coy about this as though it was part of some grand plan all along.

Now for the good news:

I caught the tail end of this event and the two good pieces of news I gathered was the discussion about the Las Vegas market and T-Mobile/MetroPCS spectrum. Good news for Las Vegas residents as T-Mobile is set to “join” their networks together going from 5×5 network capacity to 10×10. In technical terms that means a great deal, but in laymen terms it just means you can hopefully expect better service. That’s expected to be complete any day now.

The second piece of intel was the mention that T-Mobile would “blow through” their goal of 100 million pops covered with LTE by the end of summer. This from T-Mobile’s CTO Neville Ray who said that in the next six weeks T-Mobile plans to meet and surpass their stated goal of 100 million LTE pops by the end of summer.

 

 

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