re: Rumor: AT&T will end two-year contracts at the end of May

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On one line? I call bullshite.

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Pretty easy to do actually. I avg around 25gb's on just my line. When I start using Utorrent and tethering it can kick up to 40. They definitely throttle me but most of my downloads come at night when I'm sleeping.

Spotify, Netflix, HBOgo, and Utor kill my data

Anyone who let's the companies do the calculations for them is just crying to be ripped off.

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marketing the reduced monthly bill more so people understand how the money balances out.

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Which would be just as disingenuous as focusing on the "no money down" part. You see it as AT&T discounting your bill for Next. The reality is AT&T shifted their pricing around in preparation for this Next program ahead of time, so it's more like you are being penalized for doing the "on-contract" subsidized phones now, which was the next logical step in doing away with them completely. Before the Family Share and Next hoopla, you paid what you paid whether you bought your phone on eBay, from your neighbor, retailer, or through AT&T for a discount with contract. It was a promotion to lock you in as a customer, that's all. But the problem with that is not being able to raise prices on your plans without, you know, raising prices on your plans. Mobile carriers don't have the same luxury of poor competition that your cable provider does.

So they raise prices by shifting costs around.

Discount the cost of the service, but increase the price of adding lines. Better yet, let's make every single line, even the first one, a separate cost. But to make sure customers can't compare apples to apples on older plans, let's do away with minutes, rollover, nights and weekends, mobile-to-mobile, and texting plans, and make that unlimited, a move that has zero infrastructure costs. We had a good run with that business model, but we all know data limit scams are where the real money's at these days anyway.

But how do we get existing customers like Joe Consumer and his Wife to jump on these new plans without terminating their contracts? Won't they still notice this 30% average price increase over such a short time?

Well, for the people on unlimited plans, throttle the shite out the ones who hit what our new caps would be anyway, and then tell the others that they aren't even using that much data. If they aren't stupid enough to see through that, how about we start with trying to entice the customer to stop buying subsidized phones on contract. Everybody wants a smartphone these days, so we don't have enough old flip-phone customers being scammed into offsetting our smartphone discounts anymore. We'll instead let people buy phones for full price with interest free installments.

But that would cost even more for the average smartphone-using customer, right?

Of course, so we take some money off their bill, just enough to make it look like a substantial discount but not enough to fully cover the cost to rent the phone.

Did you say "rent"?

Oh yeah, with this new plan, customers can pay for a phone for 12 months, then give it back to us in exchange for a new phone, which they'll again rent for 12 months.

How much would they pay for that 12 months of use?

This is the best part: 60% of the value of the phone, plus all of the sales tax!

And then we get the phone back?

Yes, unless the customer decides to pay off the phone over the next 8 additional months. Otherwise, the customer starts all over with a brand new phone.

But given a smartphone's reasonable value retention over 12 months, wouldn't renting a phone be an incredibly retarded decision for the consumer?

It sure would, and for the extra retarded, we'll let them pay 75% of the phone's value, all taxes, and then give it back to us after 18 months, or 80% of the phone's value for 2 years!

Wow, so even in the best case scenario for the customer, they're paying full price plus tax for a smartphone, and we've effectively raised the price of our service by no longer absorbing the cost of contracted discounts in the service plan.

And we did it by using one of the oldest pricing strategies known to man. Artificially inflate the cost, then discount it.



It's pretty transparent to me, and I understand why AT&T doesn't want to focus on that in a commercial.

Someone's mad

Yeah, let me run out and switch.

I'd broke within three months.