AT&T's 'Best-Ever Pricing' Draws Derision from T-Mobile

The ongoing four-way battle for dominance in the mobile field produces some amazing results sometimes, and as families and individuals look for the necessary means to save money on everyday bills and other operations, the mobile bill looks to be a good place to start. To that end, AT&T brought out a new promotion called “Best-Ever Pricing”, and that particular moniker drew plenty of derision from AT&T's rivals over at T-Mobile, who is itself re-engineering its pricing structure in a bid to draw business away from larger competitors.

AT&T's “Best-Ever Pricing”, according to reports, boils down to something like $160 for four lines. Sounds like a pretty good price, particularly for working families. But AT&T's Best-Ever Pricing comes with what T-Mobile CEO, John Legere, refers to as “...a boatload of crap.” More specifically, Legere describes said boatload as containing things like “...domestic overages, international roaming fees, hidden device subsidy costs, and on and on.” That certainly doesn't help AT&T's picture much, but it only gets worse as Legere then compared the nuts and bolts of pricing between T-Mobile's plans and AT&T's Best-Ever Pricing.

Legere described how AT&T was offering up its four lines at $160, and promptly pointed out that T-Mobile was asking $100 for four lines. But in addition to that, T-Mobile was offering up unlimited talk, text and a full 10 gigabytes of LTE data across the four lines in question. Legere then twisted the knife, actively laughing at AT&T's efforts in a blog post—the phrase “LOL” was actually used, at last report—and following it up by referring to AT&T's Best-Ever Pricing as “BS.” Legere even showed off the math involved, noting that a savings of $60 a month represents a savings of $1,440 over the course of two years total, and that's no small savings viewed even over a two year aggregate.

While Legere's response might seem extreme, there's little room to deny that it's working, and in grand style. Just in the first quarter, T-Mobile reportedly picked up 1.3 million new monthly subscribers, though the company did post a quarterly loss for the fourth time running. But with subscribers on the rise and pricing holding the line, it may well be that T-Mobile's looking to be the volume provider in the long term. There are advantages in being the value provider, because in that case, users will often stick with a company simply for the lowest costs, as long as the service isn't prohibitively bad. If the service can actually be used, then many will put up with bumps along the way just for the sake of the lower bills. There are disadvantages, of course, to being the value provider—negative customer perception thanks to the “you get what you pay for” philosophy, a potential impact from competitors that can provide more even if for a higher cost, and the like—but the value provider can often hold out quite a bit of competition by offering a simple, entry-level product for less.

Only time will tell in terms of just how well T-Mobile's plan will work, but it's clear that T-Mobile has plenty of evidence on its side to help pull subscribers away from the other firms. It may not work—and it may not work in the way T-Mobile hopes, either—but it could work, and if it does, T-Mobile will likely only come out better for it.