Anyone who has taken a middle school health class knows that drug dealers are always lurking around, offering free samples of crack or PCP to children to get them hooked and turn them into paying customers. Apparently the good people at T-Mobile were paying attention in those classes, too.
On Monday the company announced that GoSmart, a T-Mobile subsidiary specializing in low-cost prepaid phone plans, would offer free access to Facebook (FB) and Facebook Messenger to all its customers, even those who don’t have a data plan. For T-Mobile, the deal has the potential to get people used to using their phones for Internet, then convince them to migrate to a full data plan. GoSmart’s monthly plan with unlimited voice and text service costs $30; adding 5GB of high-speed data is an additional $15 monthly.
Facebook has been interested in this type of arrangement for some time as a way to encourage increased use of the service among people who can’t afford costly data plans. When Mark Zuckerberg announced Internet.org, an effort to increase global access to the Internet, one of the core principles was to exempt certain services, like Facebook and Wikipedia, from data plans in low-income countries. The exact terms of the agreement between the companies aren’t clear.
Not everyone loves the idea of Internet providers cutting deals with content companies to provide some services with advantages in reaching customers. Advocates of net neutrality fear that offering preferential treatment will squash innovation; Facebook’s next competitor won’t get free access to GoSmart customers. But regulators in the U.S. generally think mobile providers should be given wider leverage to experiment with plans like this than physical broadband providers, since wireless Internet is so nascent.
In any case, the deal is further evidence that T-Mobile is pushing the envelope when it comes to offering novel services to lure more customers to its network.
