TMobile marketed some of their plans, in the past as having a price lock guarantee for life – until they decided to raise rates anyway.
- They argued the bold “”Guaranteed price for life” in the marketing was overruled by squirrely language buried in their contract fine print, so lying to the customer was okay – and they raised prices.
- When they bought Sprint, they argued that doing so would lead to lower prices and more services. In fact, prices in the industry were going down prior to the acquisition. Once the country went from 4 large companies to three, prices have since gone up every year. TMobile lied again.
- In the spring of 2025, they raised rates by $5 per line per month.
- They rolled out the price hike with a single text message to customers – with a link to a supposed list of new account benefits. First, the date of the price hike was not correct. Second, the link just went to our generic account page without any information on alleged “new benefits”. They botched this.
- In the summer of 2026, they raised rates again by $6 per line per month, raising our rates by more than one-third.
- They had also quietly cut services – whereas our account used to have 4G/5G mobile hotspot support, they had cut that service, without telling us, to “3G” or 512 kbps maximum throughput.
- TMobile – which built its brand as the “Uncarrier” managed to torch their entire brand and become the exact thing they had proclaimed not to be. In one fell swoop, they became the ugly carrier with poor coverage. They literally torched their longest and most loyal customers.
Because they did this, we decided to look at options and quickly saw that our state has among the worst TMobile network coverage of any US state – most of eastern Oregon is “Uncovered” by TMobile, with gaping holes in coverage on the Cascade highway passes as well.
We looked at coverage of others and found AT&T and Verizon are both FAR better than TMobile’s coverage. TMobile knows their coverage is bad – and that is probably why the pioneered the T-Satellite service with SpaceX – which provides cellular phone text messaging via SpaceX StarLink. We subscribed to that because of the coverage limitations – and it does work quite well.
But catching up on the poor terrestrial TMobile coverage, there was no question we would move our 3 lines to other carriers – which in our case will be USMobile, an MVNO that let’s us choose which of the 3 big carriers we want to be on.
TMobile blew up their own brand loyalty.
Other Carriers
There are 3 “big” cellular carriers: AT&T, Verizon and TMobile plus some smaller regional carriers like US Cellular and others that have their own towers too, but rely on roaming agreements with the big 3 for full coverage.
There are also many Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) that buy network capacity from the big 3 and then resell that at a discount, typically with features different than the big 3’s expensive brand name plans.
Some of the MVNO carriers, which provide sharply discounted pricing plans include:
- Mint Mobile – which is now wholly owned by TMobile and runs on the same TMobile network – but has plans as low as $15/month.
- USMobile – a unique MVNO that let’s you choose which of the 3 network providers to use – for prices around $30 +/- per month.
- Visible Wireless – a subsidary of Verizon, is currently offering a $30/month plan, price guaranteed for 3 years, which runs on the Verizon network.
- Google Fi – run by Google
- Consumer Cellular
- XFinity Mobile – run by Comcast. Similarly, my cable company TDS Telecom has a discounted cellular service plan.
- Straight Talk – offered by Walmart
And many more.
The main limitations you might encounter with an MVNO:
- For some MVNOs, the MVNO’s customers may not receive priority on a heavily congested network. That means, say, your MVNO is on AT&T and you are at a downtown convention center filled with active cell users, AT&T might give priority to AT&T customers and lower priority to MVNO customers (but not all plans are like this).
- Some big carrier plans may provided international services, or at least Canada and Mexico, whereas some MVNO plans might not (unless you pay an additional fee).
- Some carriers – or MVNOs – might offer better family discount plans.
You really need to look at each plan to learn what it offers and decide what is important to you.
How to Switch Carriers
It’s simple. Identify which carrier, or MVNO you wish to move to.
Gather your
- TMobile account #
- Your port out or transfer PIN #
- Your zip code
- The phone # of the line you wish to transfer.
You can get the above information from your TLife app on your phone, or possibly by logging into the TMobile web site. I had to use the TLife app to get the Port out pin #, as follows:
- Log in to the T-Life app from your device while on the T-Mobile network, with Wi-Fi turned off.
- Select Account (previously Manage).
- Select the gear icon in the top right corner.
- Select Permission & controls.
- Select Transfer PIN.
The PIN # will be valid for just a few days so request that shortly before you plan to start transferring lines.
Create an account at your new carriers web site and select a plan and request a transfer of your phone # – you’ll need the above information for this. DO NOT CANCEL YOUR TMOBILE ACCOUNT YET.
If you have multiple phone lines on TMobile, identify the phone number that is the primary phone number for the account; you will transfer this number LAST. That means, transfer each of the other phone numbers first, and then primary account phone number as the last number to move.
Create the transfer request BEFORE canceling your TMobile account – so that your phone # can be transferred over. Do not cancel your TMobile account until all of your lines are transferred.
The transfer, for most people, will take a few minutes. Many have said it took 1 to 30 minutes. Although in some cases, it can supposedly take up to 24 hours. Your phone # will continue to operate on TMobile until the transfer has gone through.
Most phones can now use an “eSIM” which is downloaded to your phone. Your new carrier will have information on how to get your new eSIM. You might have to look up online for information on how to install the eSIM to your phone.
We found that the US Mobile eSIM install instructions were a bit misleading. Their instructions said you phone should be connected via Wi-Fi only, so logically we did that and put the phone in Airplane mode. Then you go to the SIM Manager to add the eSIM – but all the SIM functions were effectively greyed out and inoperable! Turns out we really need to have Airplane mode OFF! Once that was set to Off, the eSIM Add function worked fine – and to add the eSIM, we pointed the camera at a QR code provided by US Mobile (either on your PC screen or also emailed to you), scanned the QR code and it then installs and configures your phone for US Mobile and the underlying cellular network.
Some older phones may require a physical SIM card – and your new carrier will have to provide that to you either in person at a vendor’s store front or by mailing you the physical SIM. Your new service will not activate on the new carrier until your phone is updated with the new SIM and you “activate” the new service. USMobile will mail you a SIM card if you need to go that route, but it can take 5-7 days for the physical SIM to arrive.
Network Performance
We are using the “Dark Star” US Mobile network, which is actually AT&T. AT&T’s signal at our house is not great – in fact, SpeedTest.net was showing just 1-3 Mbps performance in download speeds from inside our house, about 8-10 Mbps in most of my backyard, but then 67 Mbps at one sweet spot in the yard!
That’s crazy as some cellular tools put the closest A&T tower about 1/2 mile from our house. Two things are possible here – the closest AT&T tower may favor the North-South direction along a highway, and does not cover well directly west, where we live. We also live in a juniper forest and that may be providing some signal degradation.
By comparison, our prior TMobile service generally delivered 10+ Mbps from inside the home and up to 200 Mbps in a sweet spot for TMobile in our backyard.
Most of the time, at home, our phones are connected via Wi-Fi so the slow 5G performance does not matter. We have 3 APs online at the moment, and have a couple more we could deploy if we wanted to. But we already have Wi-Fi access over our entire lot so that seems pretty cood!
I live in a relatively small town. I was amazed to see that both TMobile and AT&T have about six cell sites in our small downtown core – literally cell sites covering just a few blocks each! I will have to go down there and test performance. I’ve tested TMobile from the barbershop down there, and last time was getting 600 Mbps!
As we travel around we will test the AT&T coverage and network performance. I believe the coverage will be the most important attribute for us – and we will likely stay with AT&T. Verizon would have the next best for coverage, and TMobile, based on our experience has much less coverage but generally higher performance data speeds. With USMobile we can select which network to use – even, for a small monthly fee, pay to have our phone run on any 2 of the networks, selecting which ever one works the best.
