T-Mobile Broadband Information

T-Mobile Broadband

T-Mobile broadband otherwise known as WebConnect is offered by T-Mobile USA a Bellevue, Washington based company.  T-Mobile USA has been in existence for about 17 years with the original company being established in 1994 as VoiceStream Wireless PCS.  The company continued as VoiceStream Wireless until Deutsche Telekom purchase them in 2001 and renamed it to T-Mobile USA.  As of March 20, 2011 T-Mobile is facing another acquisition from AT&T and if OK’d by regulatory authorities would create the largest wireless carrier in the United States.

Although AT&T has had their offer accepted by T-Mobile’s parent company the road to acquisition may not be a smooth one.  Many people and companies feel that this acquisition will severely limit consumer choice with Sprint recently filing to block the sale.  One can only think that Verizon will not be that far behind in voicing their objections to the sale seeing as it will give AT&T a huge influx of customers, much needed spectrum and create the largest wireless provider in the United States.

T-Mobile broadband is not slowing down to wait and see if this acquisition will actually take place.  Recently T-Mobile announced that they are introducing dual band mobile broadband which will up their theoretical download speeds to 42 Mbps and is being rolled out in 55 cities across the US.  This puts T-Mobile in the position to rival Verizon’s LTE network which has a theoretical top speed of 50 Mbps.  Although neither of these carriers have true 4G speeds, which is a minimum of 100 Mbps, it does get them almost half or there.

The above development could make things even trickier for AT&T to complete their acquisition since they have the slowest network in the country and this can be seen as giving AT&T an unfair advantage in buying one of the fastest.

T-Mobile broadband offers their services under the name WebConnect and as seen with other providers it comes in several flavors.  The T-Mobile broadband data plans are as follows:

• 200 MB a month for $29.99
• 2 GB a month for $39.99
• 5 GB a month for $49.99
• 10 GB a month for $84.99

The true beauty of these T-Mobile broadband data plans is that they are overage free, which means that once you use up your preassigned data limit you will not be charged a per megabyte fee for everything you use from then on.  Instead the connection speed will be lowered to 2G speeds until your next month’s billing starts.  To me this is a whole universe better than receiving a bill at the end of the month with huge overage fees on it, which I wasn’t expecting.  Sure it may be slower for last week or couple days of the month, but it’s going to be a whole lot cheaper on your bill.

The T-Mobile broadband data plans are also available without contract if you buy the air card out right at full market value.  As an example instead of getting the T-Mobile® Jet™ 2.0 at $29.99 under contract you would be paying $99.99, but no two year contract.  In addition if you already have a T-Mobile voice line and you can save an additional 20% on your new T-Mobile broadband data plan.

Another plus with T-Mobile broadband is T-Mobile’s WiFi Hotspots which are located across the country.  Recently to reduce network congestion and to provide faster data access T-Mobile has granted free access to these hotspots to anybody with a WebConnect account.  Data usage through these hot spots does not count towards your preassigned data limit.  Previously this service was a $9.99 and on feature.

Since AT&T has scheduled the completion of their acquisition of T-Mobile for March of 2012 it might be a good idea pick up a T-Mobile broadband plan before then, so that you can be grandfathered in, at least for a little while.  And if the acquisition doesn’t happen you’re still golden.