T-Mobile Jacks Up Prices For Everybody, Ignores Years Of ‘Uncarrier’ Promises

from the we-are-now-fully-enshittified dept

In the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, wireless carriers immediately stopped trying to compete on price (exactly what deal critics had warned would happen when you reduce sector competition). T-Mobile, which once tried to differentiate itself as the consumer-friendly “uncarrier,” almost immediately began behaving just like AT&T and Verizon, starting with firing 9,000+ people.

It’s how mindless and harmful consolidation always works. We know this, there’s endless evidence of this, and somehow it never seems to matter in a country too corrupt to function.

In the last few years, T-Mobile’s been facing lawsuits and consumer blowback because it’s constantly jacking up the price for customers who believed they were under a “price lock” guarantee thanks to a 7-year-old promotion promising that their price would never change.

More recently, T-Mobile announced it would be kicking roughly 8 million subscribers off of their traditional (and often cheaper plans), and onto more expensive and shittier new T-Mobile plans. These new price hikes have joined a bunch of other price hikes to make everybody’s bills significantly more expensive and all of their connections less feature rich and useful:

T-Mobile frames the current migration as an average $4-per-line adjustment, according to CNET. That sounds modest until you stack it on the $5-per-line hike that already hit many legacy smartphone plans back in April 2025. PhoneArena reports some customers on older grandfathered plans face total increases approaching 60% compared to their original rates. Meanwhile, administrative fees for voice lines climbed from $3.99 to $4.49 per month — raised twice within a single year, according to tmo.report — with mobile internet line fees moving from $1.60 to $2.10.

This must be more of that deregulatory, consolidative innovation my Libertarian friends at “non profit” “free market” “think tanks” have spent years telling me about.

This was, of course, something merger critics warned about, very vocally, for a long time. I wrote repeatedly, at multiple outlets, about how this deal’s pre-merger promises were utterly worthless. It didn’t matter, because the federal government is too corrupt to function in the public interest, antitrust reform no longer exists, and the electorate very clearly has a head full of cottage cheese.

Meanwhile all the folks responsible — whether corrupt politicians, shitty Libertarian free market think tanks, or cocky executives — have long-since moved on to other terrible ideas and memory holed the entire thing, while consumers and labor — as always — are forced to eat all of the real-world costs.

Anyway, remember when T-Mobile bribed Trump to get the merger approved, eliminated all of its “DEI” requirements like an obedient poodle, or that time they hired Corey Lewandowski as a consultant just days after he mocked a Down Syndrome kid on cable TV? Great stuff. So many memories.

Filed Under: competition, consolidation, enshittification, john legere, layoffs, mergers, price hikes, prices, telecom, wireless

Companies: t-mobile