T-Mobile to unveil new US roaming plans on October 20
T-Mobile certainly made huge waves when it announced unlimited data and texting in over 100 countries abroad with no additional charges. However, many people rightly pointed out that T-Mobile still has a lot of work to do here at home: compared to Verizon, AT&T, and even Sprint, its native footprint is quite small. Additionally, its roaming agreements with AT&T and other GSM carriers are very restrictive, allowing some customers as little as 10MB of off-network data roaming each month.
Hopefully, that’s about to change. According to a new T-Mobile support document (linked below), new “Domestic Data Roaming Passes” will be available on October 20. They will provide an additional allotment of throttled data while roaming in the US, which will be “perfect for customers who want to supplement data allocation while roaming domestically.”
There’s no word on pricing or specific data amounts, and it doesn’t look like T-Mobile will be opening up in-market roaming any time soon. Instead, this will probably just supplement the roaming data buckets that customers already have access to. This will also be in addition to the upcoming International Data Roaming Passes, which provide specific allotments of high speed data internationally, along with On-Network Data Passes, which provide additional high speed phone and tethering data allotments for customers who are not on unlimited 4G plans.
I’m glad to see T-Mobile opening up off-network domestic roaming a little bit – but I’d still like to see unlimited data included. It still doesn’t make much sense that I can roam as much as I want next to the Great Pyramid in Egypt for no extra charge, but I’ll have to buy another bucket of data if I want to roam in Nebraska.
[T-Mobile]
