Following a Monday flyover at Verizon’s headquarters in Basking Ridge, N.J., T-Mobile announced plans to continue its #AbolishOverages skywriting campaign at AT&T headquarters in Dallas, Texas.
The AT&T skywriting flyover was scheduled to take place Tuesday at 2 p.m. CST.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere said skywriting was chosen as the medium for the anti-overage message by his followers on social media. To celebrate 250,000 signatures on T-Mobile’s Change.org petition to abolish wireless overage charges, Legere proposed a visual campaign and left it to the public to choose one of three options. The other options were a skyline ad takeover or a billboard overage charge counter.
Legere said the campaign comes as other carriers, such as Verizon and AT&T, continue to “rake in” overage charges totaling about $1.5 billion each year.
“Over the past year, a hell of a lot of their own customers have joined me in telling the carriers to do what’s right and end overages for good,” Legere said in an address on the T-Mobile blog. “These b*stards are funding their future on their customers’ dime. Why do you suppose AT&T spent forty billion dollars of your money to buy DirecTV? Because video eats a ton of data. And what happens when you need more data to watch your video? You either pay more for a bigger data plan or you get gouged with more and more overages.”
Legere’s anti-overage petition, which was started more than a year ago, has now garnered more than 330,000 signatures. The petition’s goal is 500,000 signatures.
The Un-carrier, which ended the practice of charging for overages in April of last year, has directed the petition at its three main industry competitors, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.