T-Mobile Officially Owns Mint Mobile & Ultra Mobile, $15 Plan Continues (For Now)

T-Mobile has finally closed the purchase deal for Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile and welcomed them to the Magenta Family today. The deal was officially approved by the FCC just last week.

With this announcement, T-Mobile is also announcing that it “locks in” connectivity for Mint and Ultra Mobile to T-Mobile’s network “for the long term”. T-Mobile is also re-iterating its “commitmint” to new customers, saying that it will continue offering Mint’s $15/month plan. This price is only available when you are pre-purchasing multiple months of service from Mint Mobile. However, T-Mobile is not promising how long it will keep this option around. As we’ve seen with its past purchase of MetroPCS and Spring, the pricing promises only last so long.

Purchasing Mint Mobile and Ultra Mobile will bring around 5 million customers over to T-Mobile. Mint Mobile is estimated to have about 4 million subscribers, while Ultra Mobile is just under 1 million. So why did T-Mobile buy these two MVNOs, if they aren’t adding a whole lot to their subscriber base? Well, it’s simple. T-Mobile wants to own the prepaid market. Currently, T-Mobile accounts for 21.6 million prepaid customers, the majority of which are on Metro by T-Mobile. This deal also follows Verizon’s recent purchase of TracFone, which closed in 2021, and Dish Network’s purchase of Boost Mobile from T-Mobile in 2020 (this was part of the plan for acquiring Sprint).

T-Mobile is also bringing some perks to Mint Mobile customers

The carrier is also announcing that Mint Mobile customers will soon be able to enjoy unlimited talk and text with 3GB of high-speed data while in Canada for free. That makes the $15/month plan even more impressive. Meanwhile, Ultra Mobile customers traveling to Mexico, will receive an enhanced data roaming option in addition to the already included Talk and Text on most plans.

Both networks will also get the T-Mobile “Scam Screener”. This is using T-Mobile’s ability to flag likely scam calls before you pick up. That’s a really nice feature to have, and it’s even more impressive on a plan that costs so little per month.