It’s been just over a week since T-Mobile announced they’d pay for your ETF to switch to T-Mobile. Sure a lot of people don’t like the fact that you have to trade in your current phone. But it just means you can never please everyone.
On Thursday, T-Mobile announced that they have paid for more than 80,000 ETF’s in just the first week. Which I think is pretty spectacular. T-Mobile has also made it possible for you to create your own “Break Up” letters to send to AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. Which you can post to social media and even mail to the carriers themselves. With that number, T-Mobile decided to widen the program. So now instead of only being open to current AT&T, Sprint and Verizon customers, it’s now open to US Cellular and other small regional carriers which require an ETF to leave. T-Mobile is also increasing the number of handsets that customers can trade in, and will accept damaged phones. Now obviously a damaged phone will net you less than a fully functional phone, but it’s better than just tossing it in the trash, right?
Mike Sievert, who is the T-Mobile marketing chief, spoke with Re/Code today, telling them “This is not just a promotion. What we are trying to do is bring an end to unfair one-way onerous contracts in this country.”
While we know that over 80,000 customers have created and posted their break up letters, it’s still unclear how many actually took advantage of the offer. And T-Mobile has not made that number known just yet. We’ll probably have to wait a few more weeks to get those numbers. But after gaining 1.6 million customers in Q4, I’d suspect we’ll see around 2 million or more for Q1 2014.
How many of you took advantage of T-Mobile’s ETF payoff that they introduced last week at CES? What’s interesting is that it’s not a promotion and that it’ll be going on indefinitely. Let us know in the comments down below.