T-Mobile’s New ‘GoSmart’ Plan Being Tested In A Few Markets

T-Mobile has been in the headlines just about everywhere you like, and rightly so. They’ve had a lot of great announcements, promotional material and etc. This topic seems to fit right in with what we’ve been hearing this past week as well. The company announced that they would be removing subsidized pricing from their handsets starting in 2013. To go along with that, T-Mobile is looking into offering prepaid data plans, which is being tested in select markets. FierceWireless has confirmed with T-Mobile that the carrier is looking to launch this new set of prepaid “GoSmart” plans with three different options:

•$30 for unlimited voice and text

•$35 for unlimited voice, text and 2G data

•$45 for unlimited voice, text and “high speed” data

As you can imagine, the first two tiers isn’t going to be appealing to any of the tech aficionado out there, nor a whole lot of consumers after experiencing HSPA+ and LTE speeds all over the U.S.A. Regardless, the last “GoSmart” plan sounds promising. T-Mobile’s current prepaid offerings are much different than other carries, and consumers currently have to shell out $60 to get data speeds that are actually worth something (with unlimited talk and text). What has to be figured out is what T-Mobile actually means by “high speed” data. Could this be HSPA+? Could it be a 3G network, 2G even (or “EDGE”)?

T-Mobile’s current plans refer to their HSPA+ or “4G” network, and after the data usage is up, you’re throttled to their EDGE network. Documentation is showing that their new “high speed” prepaid data plan is actually noting “3G” as high speed, which is a bit confusing when you consider that T-Mobile hasn’t operated their 3G network independently for a few years now.
Hopefully we’ll see a bit more clarification in the next few days/weeks here.

I personally would like to see a prepaid data package where you were put on LTE and after using a certain amount of data, you would be throttled to HSPA+. It’d definitely have to be one of the more expensive packages, but it almost may be worth it for some of us.

VIA:THE DROID GUY