T-Mobile CEO John Legere Trashes the Wireless Business Model

Brendan Greeley and Scott Moritz, writing for Businessweek:

In October, T-Mobile announced it would offer a small amount of wireless data, free for life, to every customer who bought a tablet. “These aren’t carrier moves,” Legere told reporters. “We try to design them to be things even we can’t believe we’re doing.” The company is also taking old tablets from customers as a trade-in for a new iPad. Any old tablet will do. “We may take a bushel of corn,” Legere said. He is a midway barker, promising something marvelous if we’ll just step through the curtain.

200 MB of data isn’t much, but for people who mostly use Wi-Fi and only occasionally want cellular networking, you can’t beat “free for life”.

★ Monday, 4 November 2013