T-Mobile unveiled a new plan to offer free Wi-Fi calling and texting to every customer.
Company CEO John Legere announced the plans during the company's Un-carrier 7.0 event in San Francisco Wednesday.
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This means customers can make HD voice calls whether they are connected to a wifi network or one of T-Mobile's towers and go between the two connections without the call dropping or otherwise affecting the quality of the call. This also ensures coverage in areas poorly or not covered at all by T-Mobile's LTE network.
To enable this, every new smartphone sold by T-Mobile will come Wi-Fi-enabled for Wi-Fi calling and texting (the feature must be built-in by manufacturers.) Additionally, all of the carrier's existing customers have the ability to trade in their existing device for one of the new Wi-Fi-enabled handsets via the company's Jump program.
T-Mobile is also offering new personal CellSpots to all customers. CellSpots, which the company says can replace your existing router (though it will work with an existing router as well), will allow T-Mobile customers get full bars of service while at home in environments where they otherwise wouldn't have full service. They will be free (a $25 deposit is required) and available to any customer.
Executives were quick to point out the CellSpots use proprietary technology and are more than a router. "It's not just a router," Legere said. "It does something very special." Though he didn't elaborate on how the proprietary technology works, the company said in a blog post the personal hotspots are optimized to prioritize phone calls and "designed so that T-Mobile voice calls maintain their clarity − no matter how much streaming music, video or games are coming through."
T-Mobile also announced it's partnering with Gogo to offer customers unlimited free texting to any other cell phone in the world while on Gogo's Wi-Fi-enabled domestic flights. The service is compatible with a variety of smartphones, including the Samsung Galaxy S5, iPhone 5S and HTC One M8, and the company says it will be adding more supported devices. The service will roll out September 17.
T-Mobile's Neville Ray said the company is in the process of investing billions in its network to make all these changes— and future ones— possible. "We have to be ever more disruptive," said T-Mobile's CTO Neville Ray. "We have to do things the other guys won’t do."
The new offerings are T-Mobile's latest move in an ongoing price war with rival carrier Sprint. Sprint announced its new"iPhone for life" plan Tuesday that allows customers to lease Apple's new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus for two years for $20 a month.
At its previous Un-carrier event, the company announced a new streaming music service andnew plan to offer prospective customers free week-long "test drives" of iPhones before committing to a new contract.
Legere — who missed no opportunity to sharply criticize Sprint and other major carriers — also reported that the month of August saw the company's biggest growth in the history of the company with 2.75 million new subscribers added.
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