How To Add Amazon Prime To Metropcs

"Prepaid wireless" hasn't always carried the best reputation. Ofttimes, what leaps to mind is less-than-stellar coverage, inexpensive flip phones, or consumers with lousy credit.

MetroPCS is hoping to alter what information technology insists is an outdated perception with a name change announced Monday, coupled with 2 new tiered unlimited wireless plans that feature benefits through Amazon Prime number and Google One.

Beginning Oct. eight, MetroPCS becomes Metro past T-Mobile, reflecting not only that the prepaid carrier has been endemic by the nation's No. 3 wireless provider since 2013 simply that its customers get jail cell service from the very same network every bit regular T-Mobile customers and take admission to top brand handsets, besides, including the latest iPhones.

More:iPhone XS and XS Max review: Apple's beautiful big-screen beasts exact a pocket-sized ransom

What the new plans offer

Nether the cheapest of Metro's newly announced unlimited plans, yous'll pay $fifty for a single line, $lxxx for two lines or $140 for 4. Taxes and fees are included in this prices, and the bargain comes with 100 GB of deject storage and mobile backup through Google One. You'll also be able to share up to five GB of higher-speed LTE with other devices equally a mobile hotspot. No contract is required.

The second program, also contract-gratuitous, ups the price by $ten. Then you instead pay $lx for a single line, $ninety for two, or $150 for four. That buys you triple the LTE allotment for a mobile hotspot, and also gets you costless Amazon Prime number, including access to all the Prime video and music available to other Prime members, plus gratis one- or two-mean solar day shipping on some of the produces you purchase on Amazon. Information technology typically costs $119 a year for Prime.

The fine impress: These charge per unit plans are U.Southward.-but, ruling out and Canada or other overseas locales.

HD video streams are limited to lower-resolution 480p. During periods of network congestion, customers who employ more than 35 GB of data during a month may be throttled, or slowed downwards, until the next billing cycle.

Metro by T-Mobile is keeping existing Metro plans in the lineup, though they don't include unlimited information or the Google One or Amazon Prime benefits. Starting cost: $30 for a single line with 2 GB of information.

Prepaid versus postpaid

Metro's large brother, T-Mobile, besides as rival (mainly) postpaid wireless carriers offer aggressively priced plans and bonus content as well, which sometimes masks higher priced plans or adds to consumer defoliation. Some T-Mobile deals come with free Netflix, for example, some AT&T deals come with HBO or DirecTV and some Sprint deals come with Hulu. Defoliation often reigns in the wireless infinite.

More:Here'southward what the new unlimited data plans will do for prices

Forth the way, the distinctions between prepaid and postpaid phone service are getting fuzzier as well. In general, prepaid plans tend to cater to more upkeep-witting consumers who prefer paying in accelerate for the airtime they call up they'll use. MetroPCS, and Sprint-owned Boost Mobile USA and Virgin Mobile USA epitomize such brands, though at that place are others.

Metro by T-Mobile president Tom Keys acknowledges the challenges he faces. He says most 7 out of x people who are in Metro's backyard practice non even consider its service these days, a statistic he finds "sobering." Metro only has well-nigh a 5.5 percent market share in areas where it supplies coverage.

These people "view prepaid wireless as missing something, as a thing that y'all have to compromise with," Keys says. He concedes that MetroPCS was at least partly responsible for such a negative view, given its early 2000s roots as a regional carrier that operated in merely a dozen cities.

"Quite honestly, we didn't take all the expert stuff," Keys says. "We didn't have content in our rate plans. We didn't have handsets people wanted to go get. And we never talked about the network considering (it) just operated on a thinner set of frequencies."

That began to alter after the T-Mobile acquisition in 2013. That twelvemonth, the T-Mobile network coverage expanse numbered 103 million people. Today, that sum has more than than tripled to 323 million, or 99 percent of the U.S. population. Metro itself now has 18 million customers and more than 10,000 retail outlets – a larger number of stores, Keys points out, than Walmart, Target and Costco put together.

The bear upon of the T-Mobile-Dart merger

One major question hanging over Metro is what happens if the impending T-Mobile-Sprint merger receives government approval?

Boost Mobile founder and ex-CEO Peter Adderton comes out strongly against the T-Mobile-Sprint merger.

More:Boost Mobile founder is against the T-Mobile-Dart merger: Here's why.

Boost Mobile USA founder and former CEO Peter Adderton is adamantly against the merger and has expressed business organisation about the futurity of and so-called MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators), the mobile companies that negotiate wholesale rates with all the major carriers, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, and so resell service under their ain brand names.

"Given that Sprint and T-Mobile are a dominant force in prepaid, they will have a significant incentive to restrict network access to competing MVNOs," Adderton says. "If the Boost Mobile and MetroPCS brands are included in this merger, information technology would be bad for the overall competitive landscape, bad for the prepaid market, bad for our country'southward MVNOs and bad for the economy."

Adderton believes a combined T-Mobile and Sprint would atomic number 82 to higher prices and fewer jobs, something T-Mobile CEO John Legere and his Dart counterpart Marcelo Claure dispute.

Keys punted when asked, maxim the Metro name change and such was in the works prior to any T-Mobile-Sprint annunciation.

"This is almost our brand (and) what we think nosotros can practise today and in the future," he said, noting a wireless landscape that includes connected cars and appliances, and next-generation 5G wireless. "This really isn't the time that I want to speculate on anything else."

E-mail: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter