T-Mobile launches $100 two-line family plan with unlimited data
New plan undercuts AT&T and Verizon by a wide margin — T-Mobile today announced a new two-line family plan option that provides unlimited talk, text, and data services for $100 per month. Additional lines (up to eight more) can be added for $40 per month.
Context & Ripple Effects
T-Mobile has spent the year escalating its assault on the big carriers' pricing, building on the contract-free pricing plans it introduced in 2013 that broke from the subsidized-contract model. The move also lands weeks after Sprint debuted its own $100 family plan in a declared price war, making unlimited data at this price a direct shot across both rivals' bows.
First-order effects
- T-Mobile families get genuinely unlimited talk, text, and data for $100 for two lines — $40 per line up to eight more — directly undercutting AT&T's February plan of $130 for just 10GB of shared data with no cap anxiety.
- AT&T and Verizon face immediate pressure to respond on family-plan pricing or defend their shared-data bucket model as T-Mobile claims the value position heading into the holiday quarter.
Second-order effects
- Sprint, which kicked off the $100 family-plan salvo months earlier, is forced deeper into the price war rather than letting T-Mobile own the unlimited-value message alone.
- Widespread unlimited pricing undermines the industry's tiered shared-data economics — where overage fees and bucket upsells were margin engines — squeezing revenue per user across all four national carriers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, unlimited data shifts from premium differentiator to table stakes, forcing carriers to compete on network quality, video perks, and add-on subscriptions instead of metered data tiers — a structure T-Mobile itself later leaned into with HD-video surcharges.
- The sustained discounting pressures the whole postpaid oligopoly's margins and accelerates consolidation pressure among smaller players like Sprint, who can least afford a prolonged price war.
The trend: This is one step in the broader commoditization of wireless data, where unlimited pricing becomes the default and carrier competition migrates from megabytes to bundling, perks, and network experience.