Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/16/report-sprint-t-mobile-merger-immediately-killed-wireless-price-competition-in-u-s/

by rntn • 2 years ago

299 250 2 years ago

Ah, yes, that's what did it, not the reunification of Ma Bell.

dehrmann• 2 years ago

We're in a better spot then with the AT&T monopoly because there are three viable carriers almost everywhere. The Baby Bells were local monopolies, and you had to get long distance service from the national monopoly. I never understood how people see that as a win.

blihp• 2 years ago

The point being made is that AT&T should have never been allowed to reform itself as it did, probably along with numerous other acquisitions/mergers that the government approved that they should not have. There was a period of time late in the last century when many of us had numerous (i.e. 5-6) options for a while.

voisin• 2 years ago

I’d love to see an economist tease apart the contribution of industry consolidation to inflation and wage suppression.

jahewson2• 2 years ago

Several have! There’s no consensus on the relationship though. Some cases it does, some cases it doesn’t. Unions are a big factor.

exabrial4• 2 years ago

DOE needs to stop approving mergers and acquisitions over $150 mil or so. Every such merger: Facebook/Instagram, Google/Youtube, etc has been a disaster.

nashashmi2• 2 years ago

They were great investments for soon to be has beens. And helped the acquisition flourish too.

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

Google and YouTube seems pretty good. YouTube is the most old school webby experience I have these days, although now in video form, now that the web web is so walled off.

TeaBrain• 2 years ago

$150 million is way too low today. Nearly every small acquirable company will meet that threshold. I do think that a limit could possibly be set though for companies with significant market share in the same sector. The Sprint acquisition was over $20 billion. Exxon's acquisition of Pioneer last year was around $60 billion.

bklyn11201• 2 years ago

What do you think would happen to the venture-capital-funded tech ecosystem and the resulting tech salaries if this were to happen?

exabrial4• 2 years ago

The hope would be a vast increase in employers available rather than consolidation down to FAANG, increasing demand and driving salaries up.

lolinder• 2 years ago

Google/Youtube

Just a reminder that Google purchased YouTube in October 2006, about 18 months after it launched. Google already owned YouTube when "Charlie Bit My Finger" went viral in 2007. Google owned YouTube before they launched Chrome, back when they were still the heroes of the internet.

There might be some people who are still nostalgic for a pre-Google YouTube, but for most people the better times that they're remembering were still part of the Google era. The acquisition didn't ruin YouTube, Google ruined YouTube about 10 years later when Google as a whole pivoted for the worse.

vl2• 2 years ago

YouTube as we know it today is only possible with Google’s acquisition. YouTube burned through literally billions of dollars for many years until it became profitable much later.

Only likes of Google could have bankrolled it. Google did this intentionally to destroy all competition in the video space. Ultimately successfully.

nceqs3• 2 years ago

DOE? The Department of Energy?

mikestew• 2 years ago

Department of Education. https://www.ed.gov

I can only assume a typo in the comment.

jahewson2• 2 years ago

“Let’s just abolish capitalism”. Seriously though, a world in which the government runs the economy and picks the winners is a bad one indeed.

throwway120385• 2 years ago

Where in the parent comment does it say that?

exabrial4• 2 years ago

That's exactly how it works right now actually. I'm proposing a rule where everyone is treated equally.

coldpie• 2 years ago

Yeah. The FTC under the current admin has done more anti-merger work than in the entire rest of my lifetime. I intend to do my part to let them continue on that path this November.

TheAmazingRace6• 2 years ago

I will say, I'm not terribly fond of mergers on principle. However, based on my insight as a former customer and shareholder of the company, Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked to a crisp. If this merger had not happened, I could have seen Sprint file for bankruptcy, with Verizon and AT&T picking the carcass clean.

I think folks forget how dire Sprint's straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils.

mchannon• 2 years ago

A Sprint bankruptcy may have been inevitable, but Verizon and AT&T would have been forced to steer clear (a failed merger having made that inevitable).

The private market would have provided a bounty of suitors for Sprint if it couldn't recover from bankruptcy. It may have emerged in a far weaker fourth place, but it would still be around.

TheAmazingRace6• 2 years ago

The only other possible dark horse that could have emerged was either in US Cellular or Dish Network. However, I believe there were concerns with issues like market capitalization (in the case of US Cellular) or having different priorities (like Dish) that would have jeopardized a proper fourth option for the US.

I'm not suggesting the merger was "good" or anything like that. Just that the other options seemed quite unlikely.

bogwog• 2 years ago

I don't follow this industry at all, so I'm out of the loop. Are you saying Sprint could not have possibly reversed course? (E.g. through pricing or even new leadership)

Sometimes when companies are trying to merge, executives from both sides will come out and say it's "necessary" and push the narrative that one or both will go bankrupt without the merger. In cases where that strategy doesn't work it, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a lie. The companies will just keep competing and figure out a way to operating as usual. (I remember reading not-too-long-ago about an example of this exact thing, but don't remember what it was)

So personally, I don't trust anything a business says when a merger is on the table.

TheAmazingRace6• 2 years ago

To be frank, I thought the merger was necessary at the time as a lowly shareholder, only a few dozen shares at best, based on what I could tell on financial reports. I really wanted Sprint to not be a complete mess and be strong again, but they made way too many boneheaded decisions back in the day and the chickens were coming home to roost.

nradov5• 2 years ago

Sprint could not have possibly reversed course because they had already wasted too much capital on a failed WiMax network and couldn't afford to build a competitive nationwide 5G network. Their options for raising more capital weren't looking good. New leadership or a different pricing model wouldn't have changed that reality.

briffle• 2 years ago

if memory serves, Sprint had huge debts racked up from buying Nextel, as well as buying massive amounts of spectrum for WiMAX. They also purchased Clearwire. But WiMax never actually happened, everyone went to LTE, so sprint did as well.

The main reason they were attractive to T-Mobile is that large amount of spectrum they owned, which was very valuble for 5G.

https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160401/featured/worst-week-bol...

fooey2• 2 years ago

Were they legitimately in financial straights? or was it the thing where they want to force regulators to allow the deal by blowing up their own company?

For example, Albertsons is blatantly doing this so Kroger can acquire them.

idontwantthis• 2 years ago

Is that why they are absurdly expensive compared to all of their competitors?

Aloha15• 2 years ago

Yes, they consistently lost money from 2008-2019.

tw04• 2 years ago

What makes you think someone else wouldn’t have picked up the pieces? Whether that be dish/comcast/google, or just some private equity.

Being acquired by a competitor wasn’t their only exit option, and pretty much anything else would’ve resulted in more competition.

TheAmazingRace6• 2 years ago

To be honest, I truly do not know all possible ends, as I'm not an oracle. Based on the information I had at the time, I felt that this merger was the best option out of all of the ones being explored at the time. I'm happy to have been wrong about this if they went a different direction and it worked out better, but history is history.

bityard• 2 years ago

In an infinite universe of possibilities, you're right: a failing brand with a household name being acquired by a competitor is not the only possible outcome.

But it is historically far and away the most likely one.

samtheprogram• 2 years ago

Sprint had outdated technology w.r.t their infrastructure and cell towers, so an outside acquirer didn’t make as much sense. It needed an existing player with more advanced infrastructure to take on the customer base, or a large investment in upgrading it’s own infrastructure.

hedora3• 2 years ago

The regulators could have forced the big four carriers (now three) into a common carrier model.

In that setup, all cell providers would effectively be an MVNO, and the three (then, four) physical networks would be operated at arms length from the consumer facing side. Also, the four networks could be structured so that their financial incentives were to improve cell coverage and bandwidth instead of undermining each others' operations.

kelnos• 2 years ago

That's kinda orthogonal to the merger deal, though, no? The government could do that today, if there was the political will to do so. Of course there isn't, though, and the merger (or lack thereof) didn't change that.

issafram• 2 years ago

I mean Sprint was strictly CDMA, so that would be an issue on it's own.

aiauthoritydev3• 2 years ago

The best way to resolve these issues is never "force the bad guys to do good things" but rather destroy the walls which enable their rent seeking.

Regulators can work to make it extremely simple for new techs in this space to come up so there is real competition for ATT etc.

lxgr• 2 years ago

If this merger had not happened, I could have seen Sprint file for bankruptcy, with Verizon and AT&T picking the carcass clean.

This situation seems extremely similar to the failed Spirit/Jetblue acquisition [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-04/jetblue-a...

goda90• 2 years ago

That's what's going to happen with US Cellular: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/report-t-mobile-...

Benjammer4• 2 years ago

Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked

The reason their goose was cooked is because they previously were planning to acquire T Mobile, but SoftBank got back-channel info that it would never be approved by the anti-trust regulators. At the time they had Marcelo Claure running Sprint, basically a corporate "fixer" guy for SoftBank. So he ran the company into the dirt in order to make the merge feasible to regulators (e.g. - Sprint purchased a 33% stake in Tidal, the music streaming service. Or how they entered a partnership with bankrupt RadioShack after it got scooped up by PE, and decided it was a good idea to take over all the physical RadioShack locations and turn them into Sprint stores).

"Oh, whatever shall we do, our company is failing, you MUST let us merge with one of our primary competitors or we'll go bankrupt. No company at all is worse for consumers than a merged company."

cherioo• 2 years ago

How is ruining and destroying the value of Sprint, that SoftBank owns, possibly good for SoftBank?

What is SoftBank to gain here from enriching TMobile?

Aloha15• 2 years ago

I don't think that materially really had anything to do with it.

Sprint was dying - with extraordinarily high debt, in 2007, well before Softbank bought them, and indeed they lost money every year from 2008 forward - https://www.statista.com/statistics/481739/sprint-corporatio...

The Merger with Nextel managed to kill what was great about Nextel, and what was good about Sprint, and they lost customers in droves (mostly former Nextel ones). In reality Sprint bought Nextel's OAM equipment and their customers, and moved all the legacy Sprint customers onto the surviving billing and network management platforms (Nextel). The iDEN turndown also lost even more customers, most of whom who realized they didnt need PTToC after all (which is too bad, because on dedicated CDMA hardware, it worked really great).

Then they needed to start rolling out LTE (Network Vision) - and NV didnt start in earnest until 2012/13 - and as someone who was on the field end of it, was very very very poorly managed. Sprint some years prior had outsourced all their engineering expertise to Ericsson, which means they had no one in house with any knowledge. They only realized that 18 months in, and then scrambled to get people back from Ericsson (who I will note, they did not contract any of the deployment management to).

I only know this because I was in the middle of the deployment as a field resource in Seattle.

My guess is only half the sites in the network (in Seattle Market) had enough customers to pay their fixed costs.

I concluded while I worked there that there was no way for four carriers to be viable, there isnt enough spectrum allocated, and you pay the same fixed costs over and over again.

I'll go further, Sprint had a massive switch facility for the LD operations with room for like 4 DMS250's in Tacoma, but that's not where they put the SPCS 5ESS, that was in Kirkland in a rented building (and interestingly enough, it's still part of T-Mobiles operations today), there was also another Motorola iDEN switch also in Kirkland.

Post merger they never really made any effort to reduce their fixed costs (sites, switching centers, et al), because that would have cost money - they also got bled dry by having to foot the entire bill for rebanding the SMR band, which was on the order of 2.5 billion dollars. They did close stores (and RS was a major outlet for Sprint Sales, before it went belly up) which contributed to problems later.

So I don't know where you got your info, but I think its hooey - before Softbank bought Sprint, they didn't have the capital to upgrade their 2G/3G network to LTE, much less consider a merger with T-Mobile.

andy8003• 2 years ago

Sprint went all-in on WiMax as it's 4G network. I owned an early Sprint 4G smartphone (made by HTC) and the 4G never worked. I would go to the Sprint store and ask to show me a signal with 4G turned on, and they would always blame congestion, or weather, or some other made-up excuse.

explorigin• 2 years ago

Let's not forget the amazing Palm Pre that was released 18 months too late. If it could have been released on time, it might have done much to save Sprint. But by the time it was released it was merely competitive instead of compelling.

chrisco2555• 2 years ago

Radio Shack was a major retail channel for Sprint since the 90s. By the mid-00s, I would wager most of Radio Shack's gross profit came from wireless retail. They were already more or less Sprint stores with some overpriced PCs and stereos by then.

TallTales3• 2 years ago

I'm a former engineer at Sprint and I strongly disagree with this characterization. Sprint's goose was cooked but it was due to debt from selling junk bonds to build Network Vision at the time of the original LTE rollout. Their credit was ruined by that point from 30+ years of absolutely terrible and corrupt c-suite executives.

Marcello has a lot of faults but he didn't run Sprint into the ground. He is actually pretty smart and at that time we cut over a billion dollars out of the operating budget circa 2016/2017 iirc. It was an impossible position and it's really sad because it was a great old company in my estimation. T-Mobile is just the worst.

afavour2• 2 years ago

I believe you but I also think there was a third path available… wasn’t Dish going to buy them at some point, or something like that? Sprint were in dire straits but plenty of their core businesses seemed viable if placed in competent hands.

CodeWriter234• 2 years ago

Sprint was cooked for one specific reason: parent company QWEST refused to do the prism-split of fiber cables into secret NSA colocation rooms like AT&T did.

tomohawk• 2 years ago

Hmmm - interesting!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

EDIT: more info here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...

Aloha15• 2 years ago

Qwest never owned Sprint.

Aloha15• 2 years ago

You're spot on, I posted a long comment downthread elsewhere, but you're 100% correct here.

Sprint lost money basically every year after they merged with Nextel (having to pay for rebanding was part of it).

paul79862• 2 years ago

Dish network the supposed new 4th wireless carrier's goose is being cooked now and i bet will file for bankruptcy in the next year or so. Satellite pay TV is a dying to dead industry.

ksec• 2 years ago

I think folks forget how dire Sprint's straits were at the time, and this specific merger truly was the least of all evils.

Exactly. If you map out all the MNOs around the world in each and every country the trend is very clear where they merge to around 3 - 4 MNOs depending on population density. It is both economical and technical decision, I wouldn't even put it in the category of "least of all evils".

leeoniya• 2 years ago

and they acquired Mint, which almost certainly means my $30/mo prepaid plan will disappear soon.

stevenicr• 2 years ago

Really sad to see the got Mint.. Cheers for the people that profited, but I feel this is a more serious blow than the sprint takeover.

nerdkid93• 2 years ago

Check out US Mobile. They follow a similar ethos of prepaid plan, but you don't necessarily even need to sign up for months at a time like Mint.

rqtwteye• 2 years ago

I just switched to US Mobile and so far it looks very good. You can even choose between Verizon and GSM networks.

hersko2• 2 years ago

+1 for US Mobile. Very happy with them.

tiltowait• 2 years ago

T-Mobile was the worst, most incompetent company I have had the displeasure of working with in recent years. I fled to Mint. To say I’m chuffed by that acquisition is an understatement.

bagels• 2 years ago

I'm confused by this. You don't like T-Mobile, but you're happy you'll be returning?

n00bskoolbus• 2 years ago

Wait so are you really happy they got acquired? Or does chuffed mean something else in the states?

accrual• 2 years ago

I don't know how long it will last, but Mint advised their rates were staying the same.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/t-mobile-closes-mint-mobile...

meragrin_• 2 years ago

Really? In 2018, a voice only family plan was more than twice than a voice, text, and data plan I have today. Mind you, it just went down $10/month a few months ago so it isn't like all the price drops happened years ago.

yuliyp• 2 years ago

I'm struggling to feel the lack of price competition here in the US. It feels like mobile service has continually improved over time with fairly constant competition from MVNOs serving to experiment with different pricing models, as bandwidth has continued to be deployed.

T-Mobile needed that Sprint merger to remain a viable nationwide competitor to Verizon and AT&T, and now they've done that.

toast02• 2 years ago

Post merger I went from a $25/month t-mobile plan to a $15/month t-mobile plan. Not entirely apples to apples, but close.

My spouse went from $30/month to $25/month on Verizon for more data.

And there's lots of options at https://prepaidcompare.net/

Schnitz• 2 years ago

Prepaid sounds great unless you ever want roaming, it’s either straight up not possible or priced in a way that makes it impractical.

throwaway5959• 2 years ago

I’ve been on prepaid since at least 2015 and never have had a problem with roaming in the US.

bt32• 2 years ago

Data-only global eSims are super cheap. Having done a lot of international travel lately, this is undoubtedly the best way to go.

Cheaper and better coverage too.

ciabattabread• 2 years ago

What keeps me on a postpaid plan is that I like not having to worry about my phone plan when I go abroad on vacation.

toast02• 2 years ago

I had international roaming on the $25/month tmobile prepaid, but if I'm saving ~$8/month (25/month was all in, 15/month charges taxes), I can figure something out if I need it if I leave the states.

My two work trips a long time ago, I managed to get prepaid sims abroad that worked enough.

Pretty much nobody offers meaningful domestic roaming anymore, no matter the cost, so while I'd love that, I'd need a dual sim, dual active phone to approximate it, and I don't care about dead zones near me enough to do it. But my spouse and I are on different networks, so if we're both somewhere we rarely both have no coverage.

res0nat0r• 2 years ago

I'm looking to switch to Visible here soon after being on Google Fi for many years. Just looks like a cheaper rebranded Verizon to me, and has all the features I would need for a cheap price.

https://www.visible.com/

jdeibele• 2 years ago

I use Mint Mobile because it's cheap and has been reliable for my family.

A couple of months ago, I traveled to Belize with my iPhone 14 Pro, which only has eSIM. The websites for the two local companies said that I could buy them at a local store but none of the stores at the airport sold eSIMs or SIM.

Mint Mobile offered me 10GB of data for $40/week. Plus fees, as it turned out, so total of $42 or $43. I took it because I couldn't find a local solution and it was only about $20 difference.

I was happy with the service. My wife uses prepaid Verizon and it was $10/day for their service in Belize which is more in line with what I was expecting. We ended up never feeling like we needed to turn it on.

Half of the time we were in the mountains where there wasn't any cell service so I only ended up using about 1GB of cellular and the rest the resort's WiFi there. But it was nice to be able to search on the road for restaurants, coffee stops, etc.

On a trip to Croatia and Italy a few years ago, the situation for local SIMs was confusing enough that I ended up not using any cell service, just downloading maps from Google Maps in offline mode from the hotel WiFi. Worked great with just GPS but only for places I'd pre-selected - no searching for anything.

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

The problem with MVNOs, at least that I'm noticing as a Google Fi subscriber, is I believe MVNOs are deprioritized. In a congested area, folks who have direct service with Verizon or T-Mobile seem to have better reception and bandwidth than I do.

bearjaws2• 2 years ago

Google Fi is not deprioritized AFAIK and it's been discussed in the MVNO subreddit a bit.

That being said, most ARE and they are damn near unusable now in places that are growing.

Here in Orlando, Mint mobile can't even stream Spotify if you are stuck in traffic, that's how bad it has gotten. Forget being downtown or at an event of any kind.

I use Google fi specifically because its not lower priority.

dragontamer4• 2 years ago

Are you using a Google Pixel 6/7/8 ?

Its widely accepted that Google Pixel's radio is weaker than the competition. Google stopped using Qualcomm chipsets on Google Pixel 6. (Or the last time Google used a Qualcomm radio in its phones was in Pixel 5 generation).

I'm sure Google is working on making its radio better, but it still a shame that of all the things they decided to cut to make it cheaper / hit the $600 pricepoint (instead of the $800+ flagship tier) is... the radio.

On the other hand, I hear that Qualcomm is basically raising prices behind the scenes, which is what's causing all of this in the first place.

sgerenser2• 2 years ago

MVNOs are definitely often deprioritized, as I experienced with Visible wireless where I'd often have no data access despite having 2-3 bars of service. Switched a year or two ago to US Mobile which is apparently one of the few that is not deprioritized on the Verizon network (bizarrely as long as your phone is 5G capable, even when only using 4G). So there's options out there without paying $70/mo for Verizon postpaid.

codydh2• 2 years ago

There's a good guide to the prioritization (QCI) of various carriers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/oaophe/data_pri...

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

There’s different levels of priority within the same mobile networks, at all of them. MVNOs are just a price discrimination tool. It’s all the same electromagnetic waves being sold at different price points and priorities.

ATT just increased their higher priced consumer plan by $7 per month.

zitterbewegung• 2 years ago

I buy service from this company that is a MVNO and is a prioritized cellular company : https://xcapeinc.com/mvnovoice.html

You aren’t going to get service that is cheap but they do offer things like static IPs and peering.

mattgreenrocks2• 2 years ago

Not all MVNOs are deprioritized. Many are, but the Reddit thread mentioned in a sibling comment outlines it well.

Been with Verizon Wireless for 20 years. Got sick of how expensive their entry level 5G plan was with deprioritized data. Switched to US Mobile a few months ago. Half the price month-to-month, good prioritized data pool (35GB), and 5G UW access.

kevin_thibedeau2• 2 years ago

Mint is part of T-mobile now so it shouldn't be deprioritized any more.

KingFelix• 2 years ago

Stetson Dogge has created an awesome tool here - It's a crazy breakdown similar to the site you linked but with a bit more

https://airtable.com/appQ7TstG5Wn17FjY/shrraH105YVJQF2Yr/tbl...

and he made a website comparison as well

https://www.bestphoneplans.net/

aidenn0• 2 years ago

Nice; doesn't include my MVNO (Ting) though.

silisili• 2 years ago

I went from a $15/mo Mint plan to a $0/mo Dish plan. So, worked for me I guess?

joshstrange• 2 years ago

I wish there was an equivalent of https://prepaidcompare.net/ for IoT.

I had to scour a bunch of different providers and often call/email for pricing to put together a list of options in a spreadsheet. I needed cellular service for iPads but they are only used a handful of times a year (normally <50MB each) and Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T all wanted something like $30/mo per iPad (every month). Even their "IoT" plans with pooled data wanted an absurd per-device fee every month.

I finally settled on SimpleX [0] which has been working very well though I wish their API was a little nicer. I pay an upfront fee ($3) for each eSIM then, based on the plan I picked, I pay $0.04/MB and $0.25/device/mo. I wanted a lower per-device per-month fee for a higher per-MB fee. They have other plans where the MB cost is cheaper and you pay more per month. If I ever get to the point where I'm using the iPads more frequently then maybe it will be worth switching to one of those plans but as it is I pay <$100 per event I do for all my data which I'm very happy with (42 iPads).

[0] https://simplexwireless.com

smm11• 2 years ago

Mint, or at least some time back.

hersko2• 2 years ago

Anecdotally, i'm now paying far less then I used to for wireless service. $26/month on verizon's network for two lines through US mobile.

RIMR• 2 years ago

The only bright side to the merger was that T-Mobile inherited Sprint's permanent contract with Mobile Citizen, and now nonprofits can get extremely low prices on uncapped, unthrottled 5G hotspots from T-Mobile, something you can't get as a normal consumer. Before the merger, you were stuck with Sprint's not-so-great network, but after the merger you end up with all of T-Mobile's coverage and speeds exceeding 1gbps in some urban areas.

If you meet certain income requirements, you can get one from one of Mobile Citizen's resellers (such as PC's for People) for around $15/month.

Or, for like $400-500/year you can get one through the Calyx Institute as a "gift" for donors.

There's no getting out of this contract either. It's part of a deal Sprint made when they took over $1B in taxpayer money to build out their LTE infrastructure. This is how they pay it back - forever.

If you needed something to help swing the pendulum back towards the consumer, still, the merger wasn't good for wireless competition in the U.S.

ComputerGuru• 2 years ago

How would one secure one or more of these for a non-profit?

Thinking redundancy for current AT&T fiber hookup for the admin staff and voip gateway.

toasted-subs• 2 years ago

Maybe why I'm having so much difficulty working

treis• 2 years ago

Am I missing something or is there no actual evidence in the article that proves the title?

All I can see is a comparison between countries. Which is pretty weak evidence in general and definitely doesn't show anything about what happened in the US after the merger.

mrosett• 2 years ago

Does this article actually provide evidence for the headline claim?

DataDive• 2 years ago

Did it kill price competition?

My anecdotal observation is that there are more cheap phone plans now than, say, five years ago.

brink• 2 years ago

Same. I can get an unlimited prepaid plan at $25/mo on AT&T. I remember unlimited plans being like $70 when Sprint was around.

dmazzoni• 2 years ago

It seems to have created a two-tier system.

You can get a "real" monthly plan from AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile for $50/month with unlimited data and prioritization.

Or you can get a prepaid plan with data caps and no prioritization for $15 - 25 / month.

phonon• 2 years ago

US Mobile has prioritized data.

https://www.usmobile.com/blog/unlimited-premium-coverage-on-...

ensignavenger2• 2 years ago

It is hard to imagine mobile prices for a national network the size of the US. I pay less than $30 per month total for 3 lines. maybe it would be cheaper if the Sprint/TMobile merger never happened, but the adticle doesn't seem to present any hard evidence.

maxsilver• 2 years ago

How exactly are you doing that? The average price of a standard-feature line (i.e., not a MVNO with strict deprioritization) is approximately $70 USD a month (including taxes and fees, but not including any phone subsidy or equipment plans)

Even a strict hyper-cut-down MVNO (say something like Mint Mobile) is still about $20 a month per line on average, for their cheapest plan. And T-Mobile acquired Mint, so it's pricing will almost certainly rise in a year or two. (T-Mobile did the same thing to Metro when it acquired their network + subscribers, prices were doubled after a few years)

ensignavenger2• 2 years ago

US Mobile, an MVNO, I am on the Verizon network as they have slightly better coverage in the outskirts around me. I have never had any trouble with deprioritization.

aiauthoritydev3• 2 years ago

Mobile scene in USA is much improved than 10 years ago in my opinion. ATT/Verizon were too expensive and T-Mobile despite that poor service made a big difference. Google Fi has been my fav though as it gives me basic connectivity when I am abroad and cheap international calling to countries I care about.

Animats• 2 years ago

Four. As in a European study, price competition requires four significant competitors.[1] This should be a basic rule of antitrust regulation.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/16/report-sprint-t-mobile-m...

CodeWriter234• 2 years ago

Meh. Go with Consumer Cellular or other discount MVNO. Plenty of competition at that strata.

nikolay• 2 years ago

Absolutely! T-Mobile started to increase prices with their newer plans, which offer less for more.

paul79862• 2 years ago

T-mobile for years and still is cheaper then ATT & i assume Verizon. I was paying $165 for 4 unlimited lines with mobile hotspot. Now with T-Mobile same level of svc is $130 a month. Its up in the air tho if the service is a reliable and good as AT&T as i do have issues with T-mobile .. echoes heard on calls, calls not going thru/just dropping instead of connecting and no service at all where i previously had it with ATT (in southern york county pa by MD line).

ApolloFortyNine• 2 years ago

The graph they chose to use in the article has to be one of the main poster childs for 'correlation does not mean causation'.

I don't know what's worse, not adjusting for purchasing power, or not adjusting for country size.

Also targeting 100GB screams 'writer had an agenda' to me. My screen on time is absolutely atrocious and I still rarely get over 20gb a month. I'm guessing the stats must change if you choose a number that fits in most plans defaults.

dragontamer4• 2 years ago

I use 2GB a month and I thought I was a doom-scroller...

I guess 2GB of text / forums / newspapers is very different from like, Netflix every day on the phone though.

endo_bunker• 2 years ago

This is full of central-planning nonsense. He wants lower prices, but is also mad when the company does layoffs. US consumers probably have some of the highest if not the highest demand for mobile data in the world, and the cost of living is already higher regardless, yet he acts shocked that American consumers pay more for mobile data.

Not to mention the fact that I pay $15 for a very reasonable Mint mobile plan that would probably suffice for upwards of 80% of American consumers.

ummonk• 2 years ago

I agree with your general point.

However, we don't have particularly high mobile data usage. Countries with subscribers that use mobile to the exclusion of broadband (e.g. India) have higher mobile data usage per subscriber.

icedchai• 2 years ago

Yep, you can get cheap plans like that through T-Mobile MVNOs or even their own prepaid plan. I'm generally near wifi all the time. A couple gigs of data a month is fine for me.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 2 years ago

Prices were always high in the US, before and after that merger. I think part of it is due to the low intelligence of an average US consumer, who wants to have his iphone "for free" with the contract, and is unable to calculate the real price he is paying.

walterbell3• 2 years ago

A government condition of the merger was that T-Mobile had to offer low-cost prepaid plans without an MVNO. The program is called T-Mobile Connect, https://clark.com/cell-phones/connect-by-t-mobile/ & https://coveragecritic.com/t-mobile-connect-review/ & https://prepaid.t-mobile.com/connect/phone-plans

Monthly price for USA-only unlimited talk/text + 5G/LTE data, is $15/5GB, $25/8GB, $35/12GB + taxes/fees.

Outside USA, T-Mobile pSIM Wi-Fi call/text continues to work with cellular/eSIM data from 2nd line.

Eskimo has 2y ("global", excluding Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Qatar, Maldives, Morocco, Oman, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa) and 1y (regional) data eSIMs for about $4/GB, https://www.eskimo.travel

baby-yoda• 2 years ago

IIRC, Connect was proposed as a 5 year solution, I fully expect T-Mobile to discontinue Connect as soon as possible.

walterbell3• 2 years ago

Merger was in 2020, which implies that Connect ends next year.

If 2024 wireless price competition is lacking, can US regulators extend Connect beyond 2025?

nashashmi2• 2 years ago

Might be a change of guards that is causing this https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/17tl1du/why_is_mik...

chris-smith4• 2 years ago

I'm sympathetic to a lot of the points here, but a key part of the story got left out:

T-Mobile's performance used to suck vs. Verizon and AT&T.

When T-Mo's network was crummy, the company to differentiated itself by being cheaper and less gimmicky than its competitors. I'm not too surprised T-Mo is adjusting its strategy as the company's network narrows the gap w/ VZW + AT&T.

T-Mobile's performance was probably trending in a good direction even w/o the merger, but acquiring Sprint (and Sprint's spectrum) likely helped improve performance a good bit.

zugi• 2 years ago

Data point: I'm on Sprint, now T-mobile, and my plan has stayed at exactly the same price in dollars for a decade, despite 30+% inflation over that time and the addition of 5G data.

Verizon has slightly better service in my area, but would cost me $20-30/month more.

I realize that's just one data point, but I'm not seeing any problems with pricing.

Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

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