The problem is, in most cities, it's impossible to take advantage of Sprint's "unlimited data plans" because their data speeds are abysmal. I would love to go back to sprint eventually, but for now I'm happy with T-mobile in Denver/Chicago.
I'm lucky if I get two bars of 3G.
Looking to move to T-Mo soon.
For example, at my job we're in a large warehouse with metal walls and framing, lots of pipes, and suspended ceilings. That makes the building difficult but not impossible for radio waves to penetrate. All four major carriers saturate the area; stepping outside you get full service on all of them. But of the four, only T-Mobile has zero coverage once you step inside the building. The rest are usable to varying degrees, with AT&T and Verizon the two best, and Sprint is decent inside.
And just so this isn't purely anecdotal, T-Mobile has acknowledged issues with using their service indoors:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/t-mobi...
Luckily, most of my time is spent within 20 feet of windows in brick buildings, so I don't think it will impact me that much.
On the other hand, have you looked at getting a femto cell for your warehouse (or using a service like Google Voice to get wifi calling)?
I'm the only employee using a T-Mobile compatible phone so it wouldn't be worth doing. We've put WLAN access points throughout the warehouse (one of my first projects when I went full time there) so it's saturated with Wi-Fi. I can't use Google Voice or Hangouts for receiving calls, since I mainly use a Windows phone, but I do have that set up on my Nexus and it works well there.
Basically, 99% of what I use my cellphone for at work is covered by Wi-Fi, and if anyone needs to reach me they can just call the company.
Sprint's network is slow because it spends a fraction of what AT&T and Verizon do,[1] while trying to get the same nationwide footprint. It's a simple math problem.
As for prices--every company charges what they estimate people might be willing to put up with.
[1] Last year, $6 billion versus $17-20 billion. These are combined CapEx, but most of it goes into wireless.
If there is infrastructure in place that is going underutilized and I want to download a megabyte of data, the marginal cost of that data transfer is incredibly negligible. But that infrastructure exists to meet the conditions of peak utilization, when at capacity, and that is what is expensive.
If anything, Sprint should give flat rate mobile data and have fixed funding campaigns to increase capacity for each residential block around a tower. If the speeds are too slow end users would then pay to upgrade the infrastructure themselves, or more specifically heavy and business users would subsidize network upgrades.
65Mhz of highband bandwidth was worth 40 billion at the last auction.
Spectrum "ownership" will be the taxi medallion of the 21st century.
What you got in a different market doesn't matter. It's inarguable that prices are going down and it's inarguable that there is no monopoly. There isn't even a duopoly. What is arguable is that you should perhaps get more for what you pay. But the velocity is still down, even if it's not yet as low as it should be.
Unless I'm missing something, unlimited data plans have virtually disappeared. That seems like getting less.
I had the original unlimited 3g data plan with AT&T. That also required paying $20 a month to get unlimited texts. I think I paid $10 a month for 250 monthly texts because that's all I needed. That was the height of mobile pricing bullshit in my eyes.
For the month of December I used over 10GB of data and 8GB of that was Youtube, Netflix and streaming music.
When on 4G, I'm lucky to get 1mbps; even just browsing the web is an exercise in, 'what is this, a 512kbps satellite link?'
When on 3G, I can pretty much forget about doing anything other than email.