T-Mobile

T-Mobile has confirmed last week’s report that it actually stopped a cyberattack in progress before sensitive customer data was exposed — something the company doesn’t have the best track record for.

T-Mobile didn’t identify the attackers, but the breach resembles the recent Salt Typhoon attacks — which sounds increasingly nefarious as more details arrive.

The hackers, who have also reportedly broke into AT&T and Verizon’s networks, breached T-Mobile “as part of monthslong campaign to spy on the cellphone communications of high-value intelligence targets,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

“T-Mobile guarantees it will never raise the price of your rate plan,” we wrote in 2015, because that’s what its CEO said: “I’m guaranteeing those rates for as long as you’re a customer.”

But Ars Technica dug up thousands of FCC complaints that suggest people got fooled. In June, T-Mobile was asked to stop advertising its so-called “price lock.”

Specifically, about $60 million — a hefty civil penalty to settle allegations that the telecom giant failed to report incidents of unauthorized access to sensitive data, violating a national security agreement it made to acquire Sprint in 2020.

It’s the largest fine ever imposed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, and just one of many data breaches T-Mobile has faced in recent years.

T-Mobile is creating a joint venture with the investment firm KKR to acquire Metronet, a service that provides fiber internet to over 2 million homes and businesses in 17 states.

As part of the deal, T-Mobile will invest $4.9 billion for a 50 percent stake in the joint venture and all of Metronet’s residential customers. In April, T-Mobile announced plans to acquire the fiber optic company Lumos as well.

Last week, an outage disconnected wireless customers trying to use international roaming, and now we know why,

Syniverse says the problem was not a cyberattack but a “misconfiguration” that flooded its network with a near-infinite loop of error messages. Things are finally back online, and AT&T says it will credit customers for the days — but we haven’t heard more from T-Mobile or Verizon.

The video call works, barely, and that’s before fighting other LTE-compatible phones for access to the T-Mo service first announced in 2022.

But when the choice is no coverage versus this, well, I’d call that a win. And it’ll only be available for texting later this year in the US, with data coming in 2025 as SpaceX launches more D2C Starlink satellites.

Karl Bode, writing for The Verge in 2019 about the propect of higher prices and inevitable post-merger layoffs:

But if you’ve seen telecom mergers go through this process before, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical. Consolidation tends to make prices higher, connectivity worse, and customer service even more terrible. Pre-merger promises to do better are usually hollow, as consumer advocates, unions, and many antitrust experts all agree.

Remember how T-Mobile won a bunch of mid-band spectrum in 2022? And then the FCC couldn’t actually grant the licenses? So Congress had to pass a bill allowing the FCC actually hand out the spectrum?

That really happened. Today, T-Mobile finally got access to over 7,000 licenses touching mainly rural areas across the country. The new spectrum will start coming online in the next few days.

The site, which tracks web service outages, is showing blips for Verizon and T-Mobile. Turns out... those are probably just from Verizon and T-Mobile customers trying to call AT&T users.

“We did not experience an outage,” T-Mobile writes.

Well, as of a couple of days ago, they’ve all sung about T-Mobile for a Super Bowl ad. Is it a good commercial? That depends on how much you liked Scrubs.

Years after switching to Messages as the default texting app on its Android phones, Verizon says it is “leveling up” the next-gen text message support with a plan to move from its self-hosted servers to Google’s Jibe RCS platform.

There’s no word on when the shift will happen, but it follows similar announcements from AT&T and T-Mobile last year and should allow for a more reliable experience, which Droid-Life notes should enable read receipts and interoperability with RCS on other networks.

Starting from January 24th, customers paying at least $100 per month for T-Mobile’s yearly phone upgrade plan can enjoy Hulu (with ads) at no additional cost, alongside Apple TV Plus, Netflix Basic, as well as MLB.TV. That works out to around $7.99 per month of extra streaming freebies.

Without mentioning this on its social media channels or anywhere on its website that we could find, Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile chose the last Friday before Christmas to tell customers it’s had a data breach. Cord Cutters News and Bleeping Computer point out this Reddit comment from a company account saying affected customers should have an email from “[email protected].” Leaked information includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, SIM/IMEI numbers, and some service plan details.

Mint Mobile is apparently still in the process of being acquired by the famously insecure T-Mobile that has had two breaches this year and nine since 2018.

The FCC issued SpaceX a “Special Temporary Authorization” so the company can test “direct-to-cellular communications payloads” to unmodified cell phones, as reported by PCMag.

SpaceX and T-Mobile are planning to launch texting through the “Starlink Direct to Cell” service in 2024, with more functionality coming in 2025.

T-Mobile paid for a chunk of 2.5GHz spectrum licenses earlier this year, but hasn’t been able to access them because the FCC’s authority to actually hand out the licenses has been in limbo. Now, Congress has passed a bill that allows the FCC to give T-Mobile access to the spectrum, which appears to be destined for fixed wireless. How thoughtful!