John Legere has become a household name over the last year with his bold statements and business moves at T-Mobile. He never seems to stop trying to make things better for consumers in one way or another. Certainly not all moves are for everyone, but they a large majority of customers are constantly excited and happy. John is at it again with another announcement, of sorts, one that even he felt warranted a video blog post, or vlog, to talk about it. The new initiative is dubbed “Smartphone Equality” and it is aimed at letting everyone getting the best possible offer on a new device.
In the industry there are deals and pricing thrown around in ads all the time. However, if you don’t meet the credit score criteria, you often don’t end up with that deal and either pay more upfront or more over time because of it. John tosses out some numbers such as 63% of Americans have less than perfect credit. That is a lot of people, and I certainly fall in line with them. Smartphone Equality will change that perception and give you the opportunity to be a A+ customer and actually reap some rewards from it. The initiative will start officially on January 25th and give everyone who pays their monthly bill on time for 12 months the same offers and options as someone who has a 750+ credit score.
Ultimately, this initiative will lower the barrier for millions more Americans to get a smartphone – the most transformational technology in our lifetime. At a time when mobile connectivity is sweeping the globe, the United States ranks a miserable 13th in the world in terms of smartphone penetration − behind a dozen countries including Australia, Ireland, Israel and Saudi Arabia among others. There are more than 100 million American adults who don’t have a smartphone according to data from Pew Research and the US Census Bureau. That’s 100 million too many.Â
This is really pretty big news. No longer will your past credit discretion’s determine what you can and can’t have. I mean seriously, why is an old medical bill that was paid off 4 years ago forcing you to pay more money on a phone? This is one more notch to add to the T-Mobile belt and one we hope trickles to the rest of industry over time.
