- T-Mobile’s Mint is using its usual twist to market its new home internet brand
- The ‘MINTernet’ PR calls out cable wireless competitors
- Mint is leveraging T-Mo’s excess capacity for the rollout
Mint Mobile, the now T-Mobile-owned brand made famous by actor Ryan Reynolds, is jumping into the home broadband biz, but not without some viral fanfare.
A launch ad for “MINTernet” features Reynolds and Natalie “Tilly” Norwood (not the AI actress everyone’s been talking about) promoting the service, which costs $40 per month for customers who take the introductory three-month offer for $30/month if they already have a Mint mobile plan.
Like its MVNO counterpart, MINTernet runs on T-Mobile’s 5G network, which means T-Mo now has a secondary fixed wireless access (FWA) product on the market. The official announcement came after Verizon revealed it’s acquiring Starry to expand its urban FWA footprint, but MINTernet has been in the works for a while, noted Wave7 Research Principal Jeff Moore.
Reynolds, who has continued to act as Mint’s spokesperson after the T-Mobile deal closed, teased the MINternet launch a couple of weeks ago on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Moore added Mint’s been marketing home internet for months to existing mobile customers via emails and text messages.
Mint is known for “unconventional publicity efforts,” Wave7 Research’s October note pointed out, including ads that specifically call out the competition. For example, a recent X post zooms in on a Verizon store with the tagline, “Mint Mobile knows people hate their big wireless carriers.”
Similarly, MINTernet's announcement takes a jab at cable operators like Charter and Comcast, without mentioning any names, of course. The release states, “people are also ready to ditch their cable providers, who have been luring customers with home internet and wireless bundle offers, but are not providing the level of service to meet their needs.”
As cable operators talk up their mobile ambitions amid continued broadband losses, this type of marketing play is “the next wave of how the MNOs are going to attack cable,” said Recon Analytics Principal Roger Entner. “Prepaid mobile combined with prepaid FWA at the same price as cable.”
On the FWA front, consumers do seem to like what T-Mobile’s selling. According to J.D. Power, T-Mobile trumps AT&T and Verizon in national residential wireless internet satisfaction. The firm also found wireless providers have seen a 15% increase in new sign-ups over the past six months, compared to 6% for wired providers.
T-Mobile talks up 5G capacity
T-Mobile’s MINTernet play also indicates the carrier has extra FWA capacity to spare, Moore told Fierce – a plus since a fixed wireless connection eats up about 15-20 times more network capacity than a smartphone.
“Mint Mobile knows where its customers live – whether they are in an area with excess capacity – and can market specifically to those customers,” he explained. “Also, there is a larger context that T-Mobile is adding more and more capacity, which is enabling offerings such as this one.”
T-Mobile has been bragging for some time about how its spectrum position and cell tower coverage gives the company an edge over its mobile rivals. Incoming CEO Srini Gopalan said in June it has about 82,715 towers across the country, which is about 10-15% more than Verizon’s tally.