mittenmitten
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Everything posted by mittenmitten
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"Customers, im sweet on you, im your little candy man!" -
does Budweiser give people free beer? does Subway give away free subs? "Oh, oh, please, take my $10. I don't want it. It's yours." T-Mobile is the only carrier throwing in tethering, it's not an industry trend, and it's because Legere is the candy man. tethering isn't going to change anyone's mind about which carrier they're going to use. I would be all for CHEAPER tethering and/or bigger pools of data, or throwing it in on Boost or Virgin plans, but throwing it in for free on Sprint is just throwing money away.
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it's entirely possible that infrastructure will move in pace with or ahead of consumption. the trend shows more consumption of media, but if that media is compressed more and more, and things like wifi become more widely used, it's entirely possible for that trend to stall and unlimited to be feasible for several decades into the future. it depends on whether or not Claure was speaking in terms of the very distant future or near term. im guessing he was waxing philosophical and everyone is blowing this way out of proportion. T-Mobile will follow whatever Sprint does, or vise versa.
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[PSA] Carrier Aggregation Now Officially Live
mittenmitten commented on lilotimz's blog entry in The Wall
wow, live everywhere in MI, so bummed I didn't lease a G4 instead of buying a G2. -
'smart' has nothing to do with it, they can't afford to keep offering unlimited promos.
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that's Sprint, not AT&T and Verizon. Sprint is about as fair as it can get with devices. I know that on Verizon, they used to shave money off it each month, but it was only to a point where you would still owe ~$150 after 23 months if you terminate your contract.
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it's not though, it's a FEE assessed for terminating your contract. lets say I buy an iphone 6 on Verizon. it's $200 up front, + $100 a month for service. Verizon charges $40 a month for the phone on a 2yr contract vs. $27 a month for EDGE, thats $13 a month in device installments. $13*24 = $312 in installments. $312 + $200 upfront = $512, which is about what Verizon is probably paying for the phones. the $350 ETF is a completely separate fee. on Verizon's end, the ETF will cover what they lose on the phone if the customer doesn't pay. on the customer's side, they're paying for the phone already each month, and are charged the ETF as a penalty for breach of contract (though if you fulfill your contract, you're never charged the fee). VERY effectively reducing churn. if you pay like you're supposed to, you pay off the device in full. if you don't, Verizon doesn't lose money. on T-Mobile, you could sell your phone before even paying it off just by swapping sim cards. get the money, pay for the device, (or don't, and just screw someone else over, you have to wonder how many people are being screwed over on Craigslist since T-Mobile started EIP), you're done. on Sprint, because you can't just swap sims, you're locked into that lease until you pay a bunch of money up front, after cancelling service, then paying the remaining lease payments, plus the purchase option, also getting the phone unlocked, THEN selling the phone. they're both fair, but one is simpler than the other. more loops to jump through = lower churn.
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on-contract, device payments for the phone are already built in to monthly charges. most of the people who switched were at least a few months into their contracts. downpayment of $100-$200 + $20 a month*however many months you've already been paying + $300+ ETF, it costs more to terminate a contract than it does to pay off an installment plan, they're intentionally unfair to discourage people from leaving. plus it involves cancelling service. the point is: easier to pay off phone = easier to change carriers. Sprint has proven leasing puts downward pressure on churn, T-Mobile has had problems with churn specifically because people weren't/aren't obligated to stay with them. I hate to say it but making service harder and more complicated to cancel keeps people from shifting around all the time. it's kind of foolish for T-Mobile to pay $300 for me to join them when all I have to do to leave is sell my phone on Swappa or Craigslist.
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there's no penalty for terminating EIP, you just sell the device to pay off the balance. and you can't completely disregard the use of unlocked devices on their network...
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they paid ~$300-$400 to get a customer on their network, they need to profit that much from them to come out to 0, which will take about a year. they spent a year heavily promoting and advertising, they have to slow it down to actually see those profits a year from now otherwise they'll just keep pushing back the time they'll see profitability. in that year, Verizon and AT&T could spend all that money T-Mobile gave them for their customers on promotions to try to steal them back or gain new ones to replace them and come out to 0. really the only customers T-Mobile will immediately profit from are the ones they didn't have to pay for. it's a good thing T-Mobile started offering leasing, because there's practically no pressure on customers to remain with them so they can see those profits (being 'no contract' and all) should the other carriers decide to drop prices / heavily promote.
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think about it though. T-Mobile is paying their competitors half of their profits just to claim a customer as their own. their competitors could turn around and spend that money trying to win them back and come out neutral (like Sprint, essentially spending what they're being paid from shedding customers on gaining new more profitable customers using the exact same method as T-Mobile, effectively canceling it out). but most of the carriers aren't doing anything. why? because T-Mobile added 2 million customers. that's just 4/5 of 1% of their collective customer base. If I were Verizon or AT&T or Sprint, I would just let T-Mobile pay me half their profits, conduct business as usual, and wait for the fire to burn itself out. Or, if I wanted my customers back really bad, wait until T-Mobile is broke, which is going to be from now until late 2016, then offer promotions.
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I have about a dozen nano sims from MetroPCS, Cricket, and T-Mobile prepaid in my kitchen drawer lol. Still have a T-Mobile prepaid sim kit, was 99 cents, just in case
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T-Mobile keeps inactive accounts for 2-3 months, which means they can drop off right after the quarter ends. It depends really, I know VoIP/Google Voice is really popular with those $30 accounts to circumvent the 100 minutes cap, if someone moves from T-Mobile to AT&T then back to T-Mobile (which is more common than you think with people using unlocked phones) using VoIP they likely won't take their 'number' with them, in which case that's 2 accounts. Probably not super common, but we're talking a 300k difference in Sprint's last count compared to T-Mobile's current count, there are a ton of ways these numbers can be inaccurate, and neither Sprint nor T-Mobile are being super transparent about what they do and don't count. When T-Mobile pulls ahead by a couple million, then I'll think of them as #3, but until then, this is just posturing. There's a 20 million customer difference between AT&T and Verizon, and a 50 million customer difference between #2 and #3. meh.
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not only that but their immensely popular $30 5gb prepaid plan is for new activations only. considering their customers' use of unlocked phones, people are constantly switching between AT&T and T-Mobile MVNOs. when I had a nexus 4 on T-Mobile, between switching from MetroPCS to T-Mobile prepaid to Straight Talk I must have counted as a dozen activations myself. their postpaid activations are down QoQ, the fun bus is slowing down
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I just can't believe 1 person with a terrible track record is able to sway so many investors away from their investments. You would think people would go online and research just a little bit before dropping their shares.
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apparently you haven't been following Windows 10 Mobile...
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I bought one. The specs looks really decent for the price.
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Freedom Fries
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This is what I don't get either; by going to the FCC pleading for a price cut, Legere is basically admitting he's mismanaged funds. "How can I pay for full-priced spectrum? Ive already spent my money on dozens of promotions, and AWS spectrum a year ago". Claure sold bonds to finance projects Ocean and Cedar. He slashed operating costs to the bone, and flew to Japan to seek funding. Sprint has offered discounted service, but they're not giving anything away. Legere pretty much quit trying to secure funding after DTK told him no. As CEO, it's part of his job to find funding for these purchases, whether its issuing new shares (their shares are overvalue as it is), selling debt, cutting costs, etc. He's been so wrapped up in giving their network away for free and being 'the rockstar', now that he needs money, he doesn't have it. The guy is a terrible CEO, but at least a bunch of 20-somethings think he's cool!
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pretty sure only the old 'my way' plans had it, pretty sure family share and the 'new' $60 unlimited weren't streaming video at 3g speeds.
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Did anyone notice that all Sprint plans now say "streaming video speeds limited to 3g" ? ALL of them say it now, not just the 'All-In' plan, even their normal Unlimited plan, and their Family Share plan..I don't remember them saying that a few weeks ago..
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[UPDATED] EDITORIAL: Marcelo, that's not quite what we were thinking "All In" would look like
mittenmitten commented on S4GRU's blog entry in The Wall
I wish Sprint would do what they did with Boost; huge bucket of data to prevent abuse (20gb for $55), but you can adjust the compression used on video streaming to either maximize quality, or minimize data usage. I watch a ton of video and don't really care about quality, so compression is a huge asset for me. It's understandable why people would hate it though. -
Sprint LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation Discovered Live Today in Atlanta (B41 2xCA)
mittenmitten commented on S4GRU's blog entry in The Wall
Got it. After reading up on it, seems like Qualcomm chips supporting this in the 'low-mid' end won't be out for a bit. This is likely why they're quiet about this; their device base isn't really seeded with phones supporting it yet. Gives them time to roll it out completely. Look for these Qualcomm 'Snapdragon' chips: 2x20 TDD LTE : 620, 618, 425 (aggregation in the uplink AND downlink) 3x20 TDD LTE : 810, 808 (aggregation in downlink ONLY) https://www.qualcomm.com/products/snapdragon/processors/comparison -
Sprint LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation Discovered Live Today in Atlanta (B41 2xCA)
mittenmitten commented on S4GRU's blog entry in The Wall
What exactly is needed for CA of B41? As far as new phones coming out, what should we be looking for? Cat 4? What? -
I immediately came here to see if people would be talking about it, they are indeed leasing phones now, this is amazing. It's like a perfect storm; 21gb soft cap/deprioritization, iphones are malfunctioning, 'major news' is leasing Legere was ripping on Claure for, this is the best week ever :*)
