Following our coverage last week, where we broke ground on how to (legally) use the Nokia 3555 as a mobile broadband card on T-Mobile Sidekick Prepaid, T-Mobile has decided to shut down all access to non-Sidekick devices on T-Mobile prepaid data.
The Sidekick Prepaid Plan is a $1/day data option that offers unlimited data, plus unlimited SMS and MMS. It is far cheaper (arguably infinitely cheaper) than AT&T GoPhone’s rate of 100 MB for $20. The plan has been well-known since its inception for being used on a broad range of devices other than Sidekicks; iPhone and T-Mobile’s G1 being the two most popular in the enthusiast community.
T-Mobile representatives claim that non-Sidekick phones were never intended to use Sidekick Prepaid Data, even going as far as to refer to the offering as a “breach of security.” T-Mobile did agree however that users were not abusing the network, in accordance with FCC regulations and recent rulings.
Customers who purchased the Nokia 3555 for this use should return the phones, in accordance with T-Mobile’s return policy.
However, there are some customers who are now worse off; iPhone 2G and 3G customers alike now have no unlimited prepaid data plan for their phones.
Well T-Mobile announced of pulling the plug but they never announced how to COLLECT THE ALREADY PREPAID money which is already paid to them…I have $200 on the prepaid account and i have unused refill cards how do i get a refund back…T MOBILE PLEASE LET ME KNOW
Well, looks to me like your original article , plus a high profile thread forum directly on one of Tmobile’s very own company spnsored forums coming out at the same time may have had some impact on their decision to kill it.
The press has a job to do, but it really gets irritating when they screw it up for people who have a good thing going . To embarass and humiliate the company providing that good thing isn’t a good way to keep said good thing going. “Look! Read this article! We will tell you how to take advantage of company X, shame them and tick them off!”
Yeah, what you did was “legal”, but when the service you were telling the whole world to shamelessly and ruthlessly exploit to the max gets shut down a week later, kind of dampens the point of the original article , eh?
I mean, what’s the point of hyping something if it gets killed a few days later, possibly thanks to your hype?
Oprah did that when she opened her mouth about how much cheap real estate there is in Hawaii on the Big Island on national TV.Thanks to that, the real estate market first skyrocketed then tanked. There WAS cheap real estate. The only reason it’s affordable again now is that prices everywhere are tanking. Well, it would be affordable if there was anyone left with money to buy it.
Congratulations. Maybe next time when you run into a similar deal , you’ll think twice about telling the whole world about it. That way, your follow up article isn’t one saying, “Oh , you know that great thing we told you about last week? Well , it’s gone now because everyone tried to come and take their whole farm away because of what we wrote. They shut the gates. Sorry.”
Ike D, we have no plans to change how we report.
AT&T and T-Mobile both have multi-million dollar product management teams. They are well aware of all these workflows and processes that are perfectly legal. They offer these ill-fated plans in the hopes that consumers won’t become smart enough to take full advantage of them.
Well, guess what? It is the job of PhoneNews.com to educate consumers, to make them smarter and more agile in this wireless world. If a few broken business models fail because of that, we see that as a good thing. It forces these providers to come up with proper plans. Boost Mobile’s new CDMA unlimited plan, and Sprint’s Relay Data-only plan for the Palm Pre are two great examples of this in action.
We don’t back down from our commitment to tell you everything you can do with your phone, in plain English. And we aren’t going to.
Chetan, I would contact T-Mobile Customer Service first, followed by BBB and FCC complaints. However, it’s always important to keep in mind that prepaid plans can change with little-to-no notice. It is not advisable to add more than the best value one-time over.
For example, T-Mobile’s best prepaid deal is $50 cards in the $44 range (or, two of those to hit Gold Rewards and have 1 year balance expiration). So, by putting more than that on your account… you’re opening yourself up to unnecessary risk.
I don’t expect you to change how you report. I see it as a great waster of time to give people things which get taken away that much quicker , hastened in demise by reports such as yours. Showing people how to be smarter but having whatever exploit you show being removed shortly afterwards doesn’t make you guys look smart at all, policy of revealing how to maximize your phone or not.
Sure, you get a lot of readers by showing how to game the system. All well. You get hits, ad revs go up. But as for journalistic consequences, I don’t think you guys really think about that. Your fellow personal technology publication Laptop Magazine certainly didn’t exhibit deep journalistic thinking when they gave their Best Product of the Year award to Zer01 which is currently entangled in scandal.
Because they did a sloppy journalistic execution on that story, they had to backtrack and rescind the award after the fact to try and save face and tail. It was a third party journalist who actually did the real digging. Not them.
Laptop Magazine’s award certainly gave credibility and weight to at that time , a new ,unknown and untried product which is now embroiled in legal troubles with serious doubts about whether it even exists or not.
It certainly had some affect on the tens of thousands who signed up and paid millions to be a part of Zer01.
The Sidekick prepaid data thing is different, yet it is still related. The consequences from your story probably did have some impact. You can deny it, but if you are saying that what you write and publish has no consequences, why bother publishing anything?
I just don’t see your publication or Laptop Magazine and others who don’t think through consequences of their “journalism” winning any prizes of the Pulitzer level any time soon.
I don’t expect you to back down. Don’t expect me to either.
We don’t deny any of our involvement. We’re proud of it. T-Mobile now has to come up with a viable prepaid data plan, or lose the market altogether.
Customers now aren’t living a lie. They aren’t going out and buying Touch Pro 2 superphones for a plan that would get killed in six months. We’re stopping the bleeding that customers are incurring, by buying devices for a plan that inevitably would fail.
We speed up the failure of failed business models, sure. And we’re honored to have the ability to improve the industry in this regard.
How would you feel if you bought a Touch Pro 2 ($549 full retail), only to suffer the invariable demise of the plan in six to eight months? Which is when we analyzed it would happen anyways, regardless of what result our intervention would have.
So, yeah, we do spend hours and hours evaluating the results of our coverage. We came to two conclusions: Either T-Mobile would welcome this by being $10/cheaper than the competition, and win over savvy customers… or the business model was on a crash course with reality, and we would simply be quickening that derailment.
Either way, again, we wouldn’t change a thing we did, and we’re proud to be giving the industry a much-needed reality check. Again, Boost Mobile and Sprint Relay Data-only for the Pre are great examples of how our intervention created these positive improvements. And, you can check our past reporting to see how that all came to pass.
lmao you rely think tmobile wasnt aware of that until this site made the article.. if this blog doesnt meet your quality standards go to cnn or make your own..
What is the best internet plan for the iphone now?
i.wireless is a T-Mobile MVNO and they are testing a prepaid plan that is identical to Boost Mobile’s unlimited plan. It’s $49/month and includes unlimited voice, data, and SMS.
You can hack your phone (legally, thanks to FCC) on AT&T GoPhone Pay As You Go. Or, if you have an original iPhone, you can use an iPhone Pick Your Plan. Both give you 3G, but are otherwise less of a good deal. And, PAYG on AT&T is $20 per 100 MB. PYP is the same, but if you give them a first-gen iPhone IMEI, they’ll give you unlimited data.
Realistically… the pickings are pretty sparse at this point for iPhone 3G prepaid data. Aside from the Pick Your Plan hack (which requires a first-gen iPhone and an iPhone 3G/3GS)… there really isn’t any good data-only choice.
However, as has been run down numerous times (and pioneered) by PhoneNews.com, you can sling a Wi-Fi connection from another 3G phone. So, you can take a Palm Pre (with My Tether) on Sprint Relay Data-only for $30/month, and have a Palm Pre plus an iPhone or iPod touch sipping Wi-Fi from it.
Chris,
It’s nice to see that Sprint officially allows PAM for Sprint Relay Data (except for Pre, BB 8350i) — I’m very tempted.
Does the Boost Mobile CDMA plan officially support PAM? The i.wireless plan?
No, but per the FCC’s Comcast/BitTorrent ruling, the most the carrier can do is ask you to port your number out (contract-free) to another provider. And, you have to use several gigabytes of data per month for that to happen.
I should note that Sprint Relay only doesn’t support data on the Pre because the Pre has modem sharing disabled in the firmware. While they aren’t commenting, there’s nothing stopping you from paying $10 and installing My Tether on it.
iDEN BlackBerries have buggy internet slinging, and with WiDEN gone… there’s really no point to it.
Thanks Chris. Can anybody add a line of service and sign up for the Sprint Relay plans?
You can sign up for Sprint Relay service only at http://www.sprintrelaystore.com (or the phone number listed on the site). It is only available for new lines of service (as in, you cannot convert an existing Sprint line of service to Sprint Relay service).
Dude. You’re an idiot man!!! You just f*%ked up a lot of people’s lives by opening your big mouth. You expect T-mobile to ‘give us a better plan’ writing s*#t about how to hack them ehh? They are just gonna find more clever ways to suck our wallets dry. GAWD! how could u be so f***** up man. You know not everyone has $50 or more to shed on phone bills every month or so.
I just wish you guys would put a sock in it next time 🙁
We’ll never put a sock in it, sorry.
Sounds like the i-wireless plan may only be allowed if half of the minutes are used in Iowa.
Clowns like Christopher Price made it bad for everyone. I was using my G1 on the prepaid network and loving it. I wake up one morning only to realize it had been cut off and thinking maybe its just mine. We had a good thing going and figures some asshole would come ruin it. Like the other Angry Dude said not all of us have 50+ to shell out for a bill for something we were getting for FREE!!…You should really get a life pal!
I switched to T-Mobile in June and subscribed to the $19.99 unlimited data and messaging plan for my 2G iPhone, which worked fine for months. Last Friday my data stopped working. Today, Tier 3 support at T-Mobile said they “flipped a switch” in the network late last week, and stopped offering the $19.99 plans for unsupported or “grey market” phones. He apologized that I and countless other customers had received NO notice about this change, but argued that the $19.99 service should never have been sold in the first place (yet it was a published service a the time, and the company has collected my payments ever since). My only option to re-active data, per Tier 3 Support, is switch to the $24.99 sidekick data plan AND add the $10 unlimited messaging plan. Now I pay $15 more for the same exact service – cha ching. I’d like to know why T-Mobile did not notify me of this change as a paying customer. I get the business reasons, but a contract is a contract and no advance notice was given. I would like to be grandfathered at $19.99 until my contract is up, or be allowed to exit my contract with no penalties. That, to me, would at least seem fair. Keep in mind that T-Mobile in Germany IS able to legally support the iPhone, so the “grey market” argument only applies in the US. Where are the good news reporters when you need them, to blow the lid off this story on a national level? T-Mobile in the US supports more than 10,000 unlocked iPhones, have teams of inside experts with iPhones themselves, and are happy to add this bonus revenue to their bottom line that the “other” network would otherwise receive. But to simply flip a switch with no notice, and then cheerfully offer the SAME service for $15 more a month, seems like load of bullcrap to me. I’d like answers…