https://levels.io/korea-4g/. He used 4 TB of 4G data for $48. Yup. In high density South Korea.
Or maybe you'll want 200 GB plan in low density Sweden? 699 SEK/month (~$82), rather expensive as Nordic countries go, but at least no one can say I'm cherry picking. http://www.tele2.se/handla/mobilt-bredband-4g/.
Please don't buy the propaganda spread by the carriers. It's just full of excuses.
In their material you'll hear about how difficult it is to provide service for some unusual special case, like a stadium somewhere during a huge event and that's why. Stop asking, just buy our overpriced plan.
Without a strong regulatory hand, the carriers' incentive in the US to to provide the highest return for the spectrum they've acquired. That extracting the highest revenue for the smallest capital investment -- means fewer towers optimized for coverage vs speed. Performance optimization requires more smaller facilities, which is capital intensive and appears wasteful from a Verizon/AT&T POV.
Cellular deployment has almost no economies of scale. Deploying a new cell tower costs the same whether you already have 10 towers or 100. Meanwhile, just a handful of users can saturate a tower and/or its backhaul, so more customers requires smaller cells and more towers.
Put another way, to have good coverage and 1 customer would be ridiculously expensive. There are always going to be areas with few customers. You add towers in areas with lot's of customers.
It's totally unlike the costs of any service with real economics of scale, such as software.
As density increases infrastructure can more closely map to usage.
Net effect if 50 million people take X towers then 100 million people take less than 2x towers.
Note how it is just about impossible to get any usage statistics other than 'per person' from the various providers.
See also: 'roaming charges' and 'air time'.
For the same reasons that it took government intervention in Europe to get rid of roaming charges.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel#Long-term_unsustainabil...
And of course, in America there would never be such a thing as carrier collusion, that's totally unthinkable, so what those carriers in Europe were up to would not at all be done on other continents.
Let's turn this around: if the market is so thin why are they still pursuing it?
Wouldn't it be irrational to pursue a market in which no profits can be made?
Especially while pushing forward with enormous marketing budgets and tech upgrades?
Maybe we should set up some kind of donation spot for those poor carriers that supply us with all this technology out of the goodness of their hearts.
I'm assuming their accountants aren't any better than AT&T's and Verizon's, which show substantial profits from wireless.
> Let's turn this around: if the market is so thin why are they still pursuing it?
To get a bigger piece of a large market and hopefully profit in the future, just like 90% of the companies we talk about here on HN. But that's precisely why they have no incentive to collude to maintain the status quo.
This is a common strategy in a growth market, such as mobile. And of course they have every incentive to collude because it would increase substantially those profits that they can then re-invest.
In other words, there is no downside to such collusion, and lack of profits in the present does not count as evidence given that in other markets such collusion has already been widely documented.
In the case of TMUS and S, and any other publicly traded company the imperative is to maximize shareholder value. Sprint especially is on the ropes. Investors worry a lot about a bankruptcy in the next couple of years. It has every incentive to change the status quo, and is cutting rates across the board to bring in subscribers.
It's not irrational if T-Mobile and Sprint believe they can eventually turn a profit, and probably compress the margins of T and VZ due to greater competition.
Sprint hasn't invested in its network in part due to cost-cutting. All of the carriers have to market. They are retail consumer facing.
I am not saying we should feel sorry for them, merely that the likelihood of collusion from Sprint especially is very low.
See, there is no downside to collusion for parties, only upside.
And it even 'maximizes shareholder value'.
Sprint cutting their rates is a bit like pissing in your pants, as the Finnish say, it will only keep you warm for so long.
In the meantime, all carriers not being created equal, there may be some re-shuffling of name-tags and call signs but as long as carriers can get away with charging for thin air (SMS, Air Time) they've always done so, I see absolutely no reason to assume goodwill on their part without some pretty strict oversight.
And of course they have to market, just like everybody else that wishes to sell a product. But just like everybody else that wishes to sell a product, if there is no margin there will be no marketing, and if there is a way to improve the margin then surely it will taken.
Maybe Sprint is the exception, and they are really doing as bad as you say (a bankruptcy in the next couple of years does not sound like a huge threat to me, usually a bankruptcy in the next 3 months is the kind of thing you'd worry about) then maybe Sprint will go under and its assets and subscribers will end up with one of the other parties.
Such is the nature of doing business. But that says absolutely nothing about whether or not there is a profit to be made for all players by placing caps on data plans and by colluding to keep prices for data plans artificially high.
The downside is that collusion preserves market share status quo. For those hoping to gain market share (like Sprint and T-Mobile) collusion gets in the way of that goal.
It is perfectly possible to compete for market share while at the same time colluding on the price of a part of your offering. All the parties competing will come out ahead in that scheme at the expense of the consumers.
You can compete on the kind of handsets you offer, your marketing message and the various demographic selectors. You can compete on coverage of the market, availability of the service, quality and so on.
Your argument to the contrary is based on piling speculation on top of speculation. Not only are we to assume--without evidence--that the carriers are colluding, we must also ignore what we know about T-Mobile's and Sprint's incentives to break the collusion and grab market share because they are, in fact, making tons of money but hiding it through clever accounting.
It's not that collusion isn't a possibility in cellular markets in the abstract. It's that it's highly unlikely in a market where one of the alleged colluders is bleeding money and customers and faces bankruptcy.
In other words: you are establishing that the competition must be efficient in spite of the fact that the prices for data transfer in your neck of the woods happen to be the same as they are in areas where carriers have already been established to collude.
Now I'm really happy that that is the standard that you'd apply to find say a defendant guilty in some court of law, but this is not a court of law and circumstantial evidence is fine by me in the case of multinationals that refuse to open their books to the point where one could establish whether or not their margins are artificially inflated or arrived at in ways that are not kosher.
But, since you seem to be very much of the opinion that carriers are entities that deserve a lot of sympathy for their present day miserable situation (rather than that they offer vast amounts of money for spectrum and then overcharge consumers in order to make this money back) I hope you will decide to strike out for the underdog here and to offer your carrier an even larger premium than they are already extracting from you for the data that you use.
I find it interesting that you begin the whole discussion on a note of 'everybody will charge what they will' with Apple as the example (of clear graft) and end on the present one, the cognitive dissonance is so strong that I really wonder how carriers have managed to pull the wool so thoroughly over your eyes that you can't see what's going on. You have to commend them for managing this, it's a long time since the break-up of Bell in the US and all the ugliness that has come to light in countries all over the world but to see it so successfully papered over that they could essentially get away with it in broad daylight is interesting to me.
If there is one aspect of technology that is rotten to the core when it comes to extracting money for nothing from the populace it is telcos and the industry requires very careful monitoring and the occasional government intervention to stop them from their worst excesses. Any and all appearance to the contrary may safely be interpreted as successful marketing.
Note that since it requires a license to operate the market is far from efficient in the present and that in quite a few countries with so-called free markets when it comes to telecom the various governments still have a large chunk (if not an outright absolute majority) of stock in their former monopolist telcos. And that this is one reason why governments do not feel all that motivated to do something about this problem.
I don't think these types of businesses will ever be inherently extremely profitable, but Verizon was making a nice chunk of change from ~2009-2014 until T-Mobile basically defected from the dominate market pricing contract scheme.
In any case, the fact that we have the internet as the perfect roaming network that all mobile carriers actively exploit yet absurd roaming charges persist is proof of market failure. There need be no more explanation.
If you were trying to run a network, wouldn't you instead have things like differential pricing based on traffic priority or payment plans which allow you to pay more for a greater share of the available capacity? That would directly align the users’ interests with the network operators’ and would provide a strong incentive for things like backup software to make sure they send traffic with a low QoS level and back off when the network indicates congestion. Most people aren't going to care if their phone waits until they leave the stadium to upload their photos but that'd make a huge different for the network operator having to handle 50,000 people in a small area.