jbom

Randall was never on Twitter. He'll never be that accessible to the public like that. Business plans was like regular Simple Choice only you could add more than 5 lines for $20 a piece

costs money to keep up thousands of towers to cover a country larger than Europe

Except SoftBank is GSM and Sprint is not. And Verizon is going CDMA-only in 2016 so taht will jack up the costs for phones with CDMA chips

T-Mobile US are losing money like Amazon is losing money. As in not. Because the money is being spent on customer acquisitions which = revenue, and on CAPEX which includes 700Mhz spectrum. T-Mobile US is burning ~$5.3 billion this year on network upgrade which are not even close being finished. It's gonna take a while to clean up after the previous shoddy management. And, even with all the cash burning they still had $5.8b cash and cash equivalents as of Dec 31, 2013, and had $3b of that left as of June 30. If you look at their balance sheet T-Mobile's "Cost of services, exclusive of depreciation and amortization" are $1.453 billion per quarter so it's not going to break their back to offer the promo they just did. Maybe it would ding their addons, but it also has a net effect - it conditions people to use more data.

my data is slightly undercounted on MyT-Mobile app vs the website 839.1MB on the app vs 820MB And my phone reports 878MB since July 26th

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/iphone-cost-what-apple-is-paying/ 39.6% margin, with iPhone likely 49-58% according to Reuters around $294 profit No reason for Androids to be that much different with the exception that with Android the device makers probably don't keep as much of the profit, Samsung I believe is at $100 for the Galasy 4/5

there's probably as much as 50% markup on retail devices so that number would be high.

"Sprint is a pile of spectrum waiting to be turned into a capability"

there was downright fraud with the corporate discounts. Store employees often added it even if the customer wasn't eligible. People were signing up for PTA.org, Freelancer's, etc just to get 15% off T-Mobile's service then cancelling and since T-Mobile didn't verify eligibility, those people had a discount in perpetuity. Many customers still have their discounts but now they have to verify every year to keep it. Those that couldn't verify lost it

I meant to say when Vizio came out they were kind of low rent, ugly, etc... today of course they're nothing like they used to be

meh there won't be a price war. Prices are already low, for those on family plans on T-Mobile at $20/line. Even France's Free Mobile that everyone is going so gaga over, charges about $30 per line, except they offer 20GB data. As a European, I know they're most "revolutionary" because of the American-style pricing - dumbed down and simple vs the usual myriad of plan choices. I think if anything, we'll see more data included in the plans rather than lower prices, just the illusion of. Lack of infrastructure investment would be the least of Verizon's (and to an extent AT&T's) problems if it had to come on down and slash pricing to match T-Mobile and Sprint. At the end of 2013 Verizon had $235 billion in liabilities not including the $106.1 billion in goodwill and intangible assets, which if included bring Red's total liabilities to around $341,443,000,000. Its tangible book value was -$65 billion in 2012, I think it's gotten worse since then, but it is a dividend paying stock, and they repurchase shares so investors like it

he is right about not competing on price. It's a mantra of David Ogilvy not to chase low prices and giveaways and rock bottom sales because it gets the consumer used to it so they start to expect it. The retail industry, TV manufacturers specifically learned that the hard way. And that is the reason why Verizon especially is resisting price cuts, though also because of effect that would have financially which has $130b in debt and bunch of other debt off the books waiting to be realized. However, both Verizon and AT&T are shedding around 1,000,000 subs per quarter, T-Mobile is scooping some of it up and poisoning the well so to speak, with Sprint about to join in. Similar thing happened to TV set manufacturers. Vizio, and other dodgy brands, showed up with rock bottom pricing, and after a couple of years of price cuts put the screws on TV makers like Sony and other higher priced brands, some of whom are barely surviving today. With low-band spectrum on Sprint and T-Mobile a lot of the coverage issues with penetration will be fixed, and then anyone who wants to switch away from at&t or Verizon would have little if any reasons not to do it. of course not

Not much different from now. You didn't own your phone the old way of 2-year contracts either unless you paid the early termination fee. Now you can choose to spend $650 upfront or break it down in 24 interest-free payments, and you still have to pay up what you owe. No it won't, not really, where do you think the phones people trade in at the carriers go?

fud a bug is an unintended behavior of a program during the course of development. This "bug" is shown as a small print disclaimer on the Framily page on the big yellow horizontal bar - https://now.sprint.com/framily/?INTCID=AB:HERO:010714:Framily:960x320 "Discount is applied within 2 invoices". Now reps have to call it in with the higher ups to "fix" it. This is no bug They tried to pull one over on the customers and I'm guessing enough of them called back to complain hence the change in direction