T-Mobile Offers Free Pokemon: Go Data for a Year. But is it Worth the Trouble?

There are two things that you should worry about when playing Pokémon: Go: One is your battery being crushed by the app and; Two is that you will more likely consume your mobile broadband data much faster than you usually do. 

The first problem can be taken care with a good external battery, while the second issue can be resolved by T-Mobile (If you’re a customer of this service provider that is).

T-Mobile has decided to lure Pokémon: Go trainers with a new offer. The company is adding Pokémon Go to its list of apps that won’t consume your monthly data allotment for a full year.

This will be part of their T-Mobile Tuesdays, which will be coming on July 19th (that’s next week already). Aside from this offer, they will also be giving away free Lyft rides of up to $15 to get you to a PokéStop or Gym. You will also get free Wendy’s Frosty and a 50% off on select accessories, including portable power packs and chargers at T-Mobile stores – so you can keep on playing for hours. Lastly, the company is also giving away $100 in Pokécoins to 250 customers, and another five will win a Pokémon: Go hunting trip for two to anywhere in the United States.

These offers are surely enticing but the question is: Is it really worth even trying?

We all know that T-Mobile has been exempting some music and video date from its cap for a while now and, it’s not really a surprise that they are aiming to do the same thing exactly to the famous mobile game today. But while the music and video savings are legit, it turns out that racking up Pidgeys does not consume much of your plan at all. As the WSJ reported, Pokémon : Go data usage only consumes five to 10 megabytes per hour. To fill up a 2GB plan, you’d have spent more time playing Pokémon Go than you would work a full-time job. Tack on that you have to download the “T-Mobile Tuesdays” app to be eligible—or, if you’re not an existing customer, go through the hassle of switching carriers—and it’s all a little underwhelming.

In fact, a writer on gaming website Feenix Bazaar tested the usage and said an hour of gameplay consumed roughly 20 megabytes.

The reality is that Pokémon: GO doesn’t actually use all that much data. On Vodafone’s 4G network in Melbourne, Australia, I consumer roughly 20MB of data for an hour of play. That’s not a lot, even if you only have 1GB of data a month (there are 1000MBs in 1GB). That means it would take you 50 hours of Pokémon:GO action to reach your data cap.

Well, I guess it's safe to say that if you're a T-Mobile subscriber then you might want to take a peak on the free data allocation for Pokémon: Go but if you're not, then best stay with your provider and just keep catching all those Pokémon.

Share this post