When T-Mobile Simple Choice customers add a tablet to their plan for $10 a month, the carrier says it will now match their smartphone data plan up to 5GB and set it aside for use on the tablet.
Beginning Sept. 3, any tablet added gets the LTE data plan match for a limited time as well as the 200MB free per month T-Mobile has previously offered for tablets.
A $10 fee to add a tablet to a plan is standard across the other major carriers. But on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, added tablets dip into the same data bucket as the other devices on the shared plan.
T-Mobile’s move to match data for tablets comes as postpaid slates increasingly drive revenue. Verizon reported a net addition of 1.15 million postpaid tablets during its last quarter, a third straight quarter of record tablet additions for the carrier.
Verizon CFO Fran Shammo during an earnings call praised tablets for carrying low subsidies and burning through loads of data.
“Tablets are extremely good for the industry, not just for Verizon,” Shammo said.
In addition to the tablet data promotion, T-Mobile announced its expanding its Simple Choice plans to accommodate up to 10 lines now. As before, all lines after the first two (priced at $50 and $30) will run $10 per month and come with unlimited talk and text plus 1GB of data. T-Mobile allows any Simple Choice line to jump to unlimited data for an additional $30 per month.
