The payout
T-Mobile is compensating customers for the fiber outage. | Image by Reddit user macb00kemdanno
T-Mobile has started issuing bill credits for the T-Fiber outage, alongside emails apologizing for the experience and explaining what went awry.
A botched firmware update knocked the network flat, and T-Mobile admits that restoring service took far longer than it should have. To reassure nervous customers, the company claims it has reviewed its testing mechanisms to prevent something like this from happening again.
Varying amounts
As is often the case with outage compensation, customers are receiving different amounts based on their circumstances. For now, the range seems to be $10 to $75, with customers who relied on the connection for work and had to spend extra for alternative arrangements receiving the most.
Chaos
While T-Mobile poked fun at Verizon when the latter’s network went down earlier this year, the truth is that no company is outage-proof.
This particular outage could be traced back to Lumos, a fiber company T-Mobile acquired last year to expand its footprint. Last week’s outage only affected Lumos markets, and all customers in those areas were impacted.
The right move
Between the slow repair times and confusing status updates, customers were understandably frustrated. T-Mobile did the sensible thing by rolling out credits. After all, T-Fiber is still in its infancy, and incidents like these could cause customers to consider alternatives.
With T-Mobile aggressively acquiring companies like GoNetspeed, Greenlight Networks, and i3 Broadband to double its fiber passings to two million, the last thing it needs is early adopters jumping ship to the competition, especially when the rivals are trying so hard.
