HitchHiker71
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I always read how our phones were never truly free, that we were paying for it one way or another. But, if that were so, why didn’t our bills go down when we started having to pay for the phones. I know ours didn’t. I remember buying our refurbished SE’s from bestbuy for $.01 each
Simple market demand in play here. Your bills didn’t go down because the market didn’t demand that the providers charge less for the same services. T-Mobile eventually came along and changed the market by not requiring two year contracts in return for the subsidies provided for the phones.
So what did the providers in the market do? They came up with “unlimited” plans so they could keep charging the same rates to their customers that actually don’t use anywhere close to the data and usage limits. 80% of unlimited customers hardly use any real data. Data bandwidth is the most expensive component of mobile infrastructure by far.
Almost everyone I know has an unlimited plan, even though a small percentage actually use more than 20GB of data per month per phone where an unlimited data plan actually makes good sense. We still have a 30GB AT&T data plan with rollover for six devices. Since we are almost always on a WiFi network, we only use about 50-70% of our data per month across all six devices. With rollover that means we can use up to 40GB of data per month and pay nothing for the overage on average. The 30GB plan has unlimited calls and texting. Heckuva lot cheaper than any of the unlimited plans.
So basically you aren’t paying less because you probably have an unlimited plan where you have the right to use as much data as you want. The question is, do you? If not, then you are paying much more for a privilege you never actually use. Granted, it sure is convenient and worry free though.
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