jbom
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Posts posted by jbom
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costs money to keep up thousands of towers to cover a country larger than Europe
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I think this is where the Brightstar/Softbank/Sprint relationship will shine. I think they will be in the position to negotiate for really good bulk purchasing. Everyone keeps making comparisons with high end phones as the example. There are lots of people that walk into get phones with the intention to spend as little as possible. They are the free phone people, they never pay for the latest and greatest and never will. As wireless enthusiasts we don't really see things from that perspective, but it is a sizeable amount of subscribers.
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
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They can't long-term, they're loosing money.
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.
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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
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There is no Mark up on Apple products (for att at least) and an average of 20-50 dollars on android phones. The manufacturers capture nearly all the profits off handsets.
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
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Most flagships retail for $650, but probably cost Sprint less since there is some profit built in to that number (for the sake of easy math, let's assume the phones cost $632.01). Once the customer pays $199.99 for the phone, Sprint only has to make up $432, which comes to $18/month over the 24 month contract.
there's probably as much as 50% markup on retail devices so that number would be high.
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Like I said, if John thinks Sprint is so bad, why did he want to be the CEO of Sprint post-merger?
"Sprint is a pile of spectrum waiting to be turned into a capability"
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Like the one where they cancelled corporate discounts, thereby *raising* prices, yet T-Mo fanboys lapped it up as another "uncarrier" move.
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
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Uh what?
Vizeio is a high quality brand that brought low prixes with good products. Read their reviews.. Dodgy? Please.
Youve just destroyed your point. Vizio came in and proved that they could make a good profit with low prices and high quality. It was a huge gain for the consumer. I think theyre now #1 or #2 TV seller in the US.
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
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I have been perusing a lot of the wireless websites and besides the rabid magentans, the rest of the comments have been pretty sanguine about the possibility of a price war eroding the abilities of US carriers to invest in infrastructure. Some people are saying that regulatory objections may have done the industry a disservice.
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
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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.
Does Tmo count the iPhone test drives as new subscribers? I assume all of the test drives are numbers. How are they counting those?
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
of course not
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Right, but you have to pay full retail on it and its not yours for 2 years. I can't just sell it on eBay when I am done with it and buy another phone on eBay. I hate this. Why can't they just keep it how it has always been. And that doesn't answer the biggest part of my question. I am torn between switching now and paying $5/mo more and losing my upgrades or waiting to see whats going on with my upgrades and missing out on the $45 in waived fees per month.
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.
My main issue with this changing of the guard towards no contract/no subsidies is that(as you said before) it will kill the used phone market on ebay. I will no longer be able to buy cheap off contract phones as replacements/upgrades.
No it won't, not really, where do you think the phones people trade in at the carriers go?
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Just for everyone's reference, the Framily discount not showing up on the first bill is a bug. It's a glitch. Reps are now supposed to call in to their support teams immediately to get credits applied. If it shows up on your bill, just call in, and you'll get it yourself. They recognize it's a problem, and are taking steps to mitigate it.
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
Marcelo Claure, Town Hall Meetings, New Family Share Pack Plan, Unlimited Individual Plan, Discussion Thread
in General Topics
Posted · Edited by 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