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T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

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Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#41

Post by nonethewiser »

winternett wrote: post #18
alsodumb wrote: post #15

When I first came to this country as a broke grad student, paying 80$-100$ or joining a family plan with friends, sometimes even strangers, seemed absurd to me. Mint was the only thing I could afford at $15 a month. The data was limited, like 4 GB a month I guess, but I had Wi-Fi everywhere and only needed data for navigation. Good for the founders, they championed MVNO space in some way. Perhaps bad for Mint custome…

T-Mobile is purchasing Mint to fix pricing obviously. I've been fixed at $75 for my fake "unlimited" plan now for about 10 years and switching plans will somehow only make things more expensive... Now ads and shoddy apps eat up my bandwidth at 5G speeds every month so I get throttled when I work hardest on my device. Even though Mint wasn't useful to me, T-Mobile buying them means that monopolies are getting away wit…

Mint uses TMobiles network. The Mint alternative existed in the first place because it served TMobiles best interest.

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#42

Post by unclenoriega »

mataug wrote: post #8
bearjaws wrote: post #6

I used to love Mint, but since the population boom in Central Florida it is entirely unusable due to being a low priority network. This means on many occasions you will have almost no bandwidth, I am talking cannot stream Spotify bad. The worst IMO is traffic jams, the one time I really want to listen to music and it will start cutting out. If you're downtown there is a 80% chance you will not even be able to load a…

Google Fi is a MVNO just like Mint. I'm curious why Fi gets better reliability when Mint doesn't ?

To add to the other response, the r/NoContract community maintains a list of network prioritization policies: https://old.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/oaophe/data_pri...

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#43

Post by asdajksah2123 »

bob_loblaw wrote: post #14
petesergeant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He'd be better off just finding someone rich to front the cash and being the face, much like with Mint

Especially since this so very common in the sports world - Derek Jeter and the Marlins, George W. Bush and the Rangers (back in the day), etc. But, professional sports teams print money. Most of the infrastructure is funded by tax payers. Salary caps (this includes baseball) keep expenditures down. Fans root for laundry, so rationality is out the window. Just look at baseball, you can pull down a healthy profit while…

I love the luxury tax...

Owners of teams like the As who do absolutely nothing to create a winning team get to live off the money made by other teams who are willing to spend on their teams and players.

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#44

Post by gms7777 »

amalcon wrote: post #32
bearjaws wrote: post #6

I used to love Mint, but since the population boom in Central Florida it is entirely unusable due to being a low priority network. This means on many occasions you will have almost no bandwidth, I am talking cannot stream Spotify bad. The worst IMO is traffic jams, the one time I really want to listen to music and it will start cutting out. If you're downtown there is a 80% chance you will not even be able to load a…

Honestly, this kind of statement makes me more likely to consider them. I was on post-paid T-Mobile many years ago, but I left because it was entirely unusable outside of cities. Signal would cut out entirely 4-5 times on a 2 hour drive. If my destination was anywhere with more than about 500 feet between houses, I was probably impossible to contact until I left. This just tells me that the situation might have impro…

T-mobile coverage got considerably better in rural areas sometime around 4 years ago. I did a lot of long drives and would completely lose service for long stretches in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, much of Ohio.

Now I can't think of any time in recent years that I've gotten no service. The strength of coverage does occasionally drop if I'm way out in the boonies but it's so much better than it used to be.

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#45

Post by notwhereyouare »

jawns wrote: post #20

I've been a Mint customer for about 4 years, paying the annual upfront payment, which works out to $15/mo. And shaking my head at those who are paying double or triple that rate on T-Mobile, even though Mint uses the same exact network. In terms of why T-Mobile is making this purchase, I'm pretty sure it's to take out someone who was eating their lunch. I've always found it strange that an MVNO is able to operate on…

I tried to give mint a chance, but I would get throttled so frequently that it was unusable to me

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#46

Post by samtho »

jawns wrote: post #20

I've been a Mint customer for about 4 years, paying the annual upfront payment, which works out to $15/mo. And shaking my head at those who are paying double or triple that rate on T-Mobile, even though Mint uses the same exact network. In terms of why T-Mobile is making this purchase, I'm pretty sure it's to take out someone who was eating their lunch. I've always found it strange that an MVNO is able to operate on…

> I've always found it strange that an MVNO is able to operate on the T-Mobile network the entire time and undercut their rates so much that they become a threat.

Think about it less as a network operating on T-Mobile's network and more of being a customer on T-Mobile's network. It's the same economics dictating wholesaling. The manufacturer or operator (in this case), can give a good deal to a customer with a lot of volume, does not have provide support, brick and mortar locations, or anything with customer server, just a high-level tech support for getting their systems integrated with the network.

You touched on a point that reminds of what Amazon does: let independent sellers create or list (and therefore assume all risk of) new products and copy them under the basics brand and undercut the original seller(s).

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#47

Post by joenot443 »

deepzn wrote: post #28

This is Ryan Reynolds' second company he has sold which he has a "significant stake" in after he sold his Aviator Gin to the big whale, Diageo brands. He's been able to leverage his status and marketing talent to grow those brands significantly. Other actors, athletes also do this, but perhaps he is the most noticeable. George Clooney also sold an alcohol brand to Diageo. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-…

Maybe I just have a soft spot since he's Canadian, but I think in this case Mint's provided some real genuine net benefit for consumers and I think using Reynolds positioning helped them get there.

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#48

Post by soylentcola »

viiralvx wrote: post #27
winternett wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

T-Mobile is purchasing Mint to fix pricing obviously. I've been fixed at $75 for my fake "unlimited" plan now for about 10 years and switching plans will somehow only make things more expensive... Now ads and shoddy apps eat up my bandwidth at 5G speeds every month so I get throttled when I work hardest on my device. Even though Mint wasn't useful to me, T-Mobile buying them means that monopolies are getting away wit…

Related if you can afford it, NextDNS[1] on my mobile device has been a godsend for blocking ads. Literally amazing how much speed it saves when sites aren't loading a bunch of ads / tracking libraries. I use it on my router and mobile devices and it's made a huge difference. Re: competition being removed, that really sucks. I'm a Google Fi customer which has similar pricing, only downside is that if I switch to an i…

I've also had success using dns.adguard.net as the private DNS on my phone. Doesn't cost anything but I believe the paid version of this and similar services allow for customization and statistics.

In applications/browsers without an adblocker, ads just show up as broken or don't bother loading. In Firefox/Mull/etc with uBlock Origin, it's redundant as those block and hide.

I used to use AdAway (maintains a system-wide blacklist added to your hosts file) but when I got my current phone I didn't bother unlocking superuser access and I believe the non-root version uses a VPN type solution. The custom DNS works almost as well.

Downside is that Adguard has a record of your DNS lookups, but normally your ISP or whoever has that so I consider it a wash. YMMV.

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#49

Post by nonethewiser »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #21

Microsoft-Activision Adobe-Figma T-Mobile-Mint I hope the current administration in power cracks down hard on these clearly anti-competitive mergers, as they did with Visa-Plaid.

For this comparison to hold, Activision and Figma would need to be services built on top of Microsoft/Adobe. Mint has always existed at TMobiles pleasure.

Re: T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B

#50

Post by laweijfmvo »

bearjaws wrote: post #6

I used to love Mint, but since the population boom in Central Florida it is entirely unusable due to being a low priority network. This means on many occasions you will have almost no bandwidth, I am talking cannot stream Spotify bad. The worst IMO is traffic jams, the one time I really want to listen to music and it will start cutting out. If you're downtown there is a 80% chance you will not even be able to load a…

I have full fledged TMobile and my service has never been worse. I've just gotten used to the idea that I won't have service outside of wifi range.
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