Lit up my service yesterday (tmo noob) with an iPhone 4S on the $30/100min plan. Once logged in to either the My Account app or the My Account mobile website, I was pleased and surprised to see that both portals offered free Personal Hotspot. With the app it reads, or actually kind of invites (under Apps & Services) - "Turn your iPhone into your very own mobile hotspot"..."Best of all we include 500MB in our new rate plans for no additional charge!" followed by instuctions on how to turn on in ios settings (where I'm met with a notice to call for activation - more on that in a minute). Logging in to the My Account mobile site, the promise is even right there on my home page in a banner - "Personal Hotspot is included in ALL new T-Mobile rate plans" (ALL-my caps).
Now, before all of you start replying - I know, I know, hotspot is supposed to cost $15/mo for this plan.
I discovered as much - combing the web yesterday and today; spending an hour or so hearing things like "where are you reading that?" and "I'm sorry you feel that's what it says"; and finally having a CSR supervisor tell me that the company has no intention of fulfilling the service (500MB of wireless hotspot) at the price (no additional charge) that this fairly reasonable new customer was being enthusiastically told on his device's personal account management portals that he was entitled to.
I believed that perhaps tmo was offering it as part of its recent, well-advertised bid to shake up its prepaid plans, and maybe the couple of pages with the $15 fee were not up to date. Looking at some recent marketing stuff online, this $30 plan had formerly really been pitched separately (not always as 'The Walmart plan' either - it appears tmo also had it available through their site). Lately, it seems kind of being marketed as lumped with the $50/60/70 plans - but not really - just ignore the fact that they seem to use the same back end, and lighting up the hotspot would likely be very easy (or may be coming down the pike soon - some online even say they've gotten tmo to activate hotspot with $30 UL, while others shill that 'it's impossible' - I thought a $15 charge, then a $15 credit seemed the easiest thing to do)
Anyway, I wasn't an existing client knowingly using a service when it wasn't part of my plan and then had it taken away, nor one that used hacked equipment to compromise the network to get a service I wasn't entitled to on my plan either. I am just a sub that left a carrier after 10 years; I was with another for 10 years before that; I then signed up with a new one. The thing is, I was then advised in my account overview after I was activated that hotspot was part of my service offering at no extra charge. Heck, I'm not even going to use the feature that much! I only hope that my new business partner somehow wants to honor what it puts in writing.