The high-profile launch by T-Mobile UK of its unlimited "Full Monty" service has so far failed to provoke a response from rival operators in the UK, which seem content to focus on their own core offerings.
 |
|
T-Mobile UK's "Full Monty" plan. |
The company announced its new tariff--which allows unlimited calls to T-Mobile customers (and 2,000 anytime minutes), texts and mobile Web browsing, all without fair-use restrictions--in a bid to persuade feature phone users to switch over to a smartphone by removing fears over exceeding allowances.
While the open conditions of the Full Monty unlimited plan is a first for the UK, the other main UK operators have not followed, with one suggesting that T-Mobile UK had launched the price plan to simply catch the attention of iPhone subscribers that took out two-year contracts in late 2009 or early 2010. According to a Mobile Today report, all three rival networks said they had faith in their existing offers and would not be following T-Mobile's example of launching cut price unlimited plans.
The lowest entry point for a Full Monty subscription is £36 per month for two years, which provides the user with a free Samsung Galaxy S II or a 16 GB iPhone 4S for a £99 initial payment.
The idea behind launching such a plan, according to T-Mobile UK, came from consumer research into the obstacles that were stopping customers from buying smartphones. "There's been a fair amount of consumer research into smartphones that understands where the market is," Ben Fritsch, T-Mobile UK's head of propositions, told Mobile Today. "But the key point for us was not understanding who has a smartphone, but thinking about those who don't and what is stopping them from doing so."
An Everything Everywhere spokesman told Mobile Today that the T-Mobile Full Monty offer was not being extended to Orange customers because the business wanted to keep the brands separate. Everything Everywhere recently started repositioning the its Orange and T-Mobile brands in a marketing campaign that defines Orange a premium brand and T-Mobile as more of a low-cost offering.
For more:
- see this T-Mobile release
- see this Mobile Today article
Related Articles:
Everything Everywhere overhauls Orange, T-Mobile brands
Report: Operators must reduce network costs by 50%
Increased network congestion requires fresh thinking from operators
Operators dump unlimited data offerings; file sharing blamed
Apps causing data bottlenecks, not iPhones, claims O2 CTO
O2's network in meltdown from smartphone usage