To continue the marketing push behind the Simple Starter plan and the overall message behind its UnCarrier movement T-Mobile CEO John Legere has taken the unconventional step of launching a petition on Change.Org to abolish wireless service overages across the industry.
While the move is ostensibly yet another marketing ploy focused on drawing attention to T-Mobile and its recent initiatives, the use of Change.Org to get the rest of its competition to follow in its footsteps seems to fit with T-Mobile’s current marketing and CEO Legere’s persona of being pro consumer, as carriers have followed T-Mobile’s lead in other ways, most obviously by enacting their own handset financing plans and adding service plans that favor customers that buy handsets outright in order to eliminate conventional service contracts.
This follows T-Mobile’s latest changes in the Simple Starter plan that emphasize low costs by starting at $40 monthly while featuring access to handset financing and early upgrades through its JUMP! program along with the recent launch of its Tablet Freedom promotion that will give Simple Choice customers 1.2GB of free tablet data until the end of the year, as well as heavily discounted LTE tablets at the same time in order to drive tablet adoption and LTE data usage.
However, it remains to be seen whether the petition will have any tangible effect, as many people online are becoming increasingly desensitized to online petitions due to the sheer volume and increasingly trivial reasons for launching such online petitions.
Update: Following the petition being launched, T-Mobile has announced that it will end overage charges beginning next month for all customers regardless of service plan, beginning with the June billing statement. T-Mobile is challenging all US carriers to do the same.
