The Ceiling For Mobile Voice and Text Falling Towards $50 Per Month
from the not-quite-free-yet dept
The cost of basic fixed-line voice telephony is quickly falling towards zero. Plenty of companies offer free voice calls (with various hoops to jump through), and the cost of VoIP service continues to drop. This is trickling over to mobile voice service, too, as three of the top four US operators now offer unlimited voice and text plans for about $100 per month. But even that price ceiling is under pressure: Cricket and MetroPCS, two smaller operators that focus on the low end of the market (and don't offer the footprint of bigger operators), have been offering unlimited plans for under $50 per month, and today, Sprint's Boost Mobile brand joined them. It's unlikely that the major operators will enthusiastically fall into line, but in the current economic environment, it's hard to imagine these cheaper unlimited offerings won't pull some customers away and put pressure on the bigger operators' prices. The bigger operators still have a number of competitive advantages, including bigger coverage areas and a wider choice of handsets, but they may find those appeal to fewer consumers if the price gap remains.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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finally
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MetroPCS is the way to go
I canceled my contract with ATT (aka Cingular) and made the difference back in three months of service with MetroPCS.
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MetroPCS does have it's drawbacks and is not for everyone. MetroPCS does have a very limited coverage area. If you don't travel much, then it should be good. The limited phone selection I think is due to the big cell phone companies locking down the selection of phones. MetroPCS does allow you to hook up a third party phone just as long as the phone is network compatible. You do have to buy your phones, not like the $100 credit that Verizon offers. The savings will more than make up for the cost of the phone.
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I really want to call BS on this. They're forever advertising this plan and that plan for n dollars, and you'll never see it because that is the price of the plan before taxes, fees, stipulations, and whatnot.
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I don't think so....
The only really cheap thing is unlimited worldwide tethering for around $15/month, which you can add/remove on demand.
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Wow, you need to learn how to google...
And I've heard it can also be done on T-Mobile's $5.99 web plan.
And I unlimited browsing on your lappy... any website pretty much at above dialup speeds.
So +$5 on metro (free tethering included, lol!) or $6 on tmobile
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Wave To Text - powerful English speech recognition software
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