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While I understand the concept of a strong balance and the cash resources available to T and VZ, while you make a good point of that, I believe your analysis is flawed:
1) meerly glossed over the economics of 4G and Clearwire. I would conversely argue, that it is in Sprint's best interest to drive data tonage. And, the economics of 1X to EVDO clearly delivered cost savings and a new breed of data products. I can cite 56K modems to cable modems also delivering similiar benefits.
2) predisposed going into the analysis that Sprint and T-Mo are, for lack of better words, "up a creek". And it's this kind of journalism that creates fear and uncertainty in my customer's minds. Perhaps, we revert to a duopoly and everyone can enjoy higher prices and slower innovation...yeah...that would be great.
3) is there a point where wireless networks will look like the landline business? perhaps, but I don't see it happening anytime soon as new networks and players continue to emerge (Boost, Leap, tracfone) and deliver value to their customers while making lots of money...customers like choice...Like, I would love to have ala carte choices in my cable bill, but alas, I can't thanks to regulation and a defacto duopoly. Hulu is changing that (recognize the innovation)
4) 3-5min for $1 is wayyy wayy off...everyone would have been out of business a long time ago. try pennies. HD Streaming on a handset...maybe, but not until HD capable screens reach critical penetration in the handset circles...years and years away. P.S. how is FLO doing? not well, the last I checked their SEC filings. Why...cause people like youtube/ondemand and rarely dig broadcast content (except for the superbowl).
5) "T-Mobile and Sprint subsidy model challenged"...it's indemic in the industry...Wonder why T took a hit in earnings recently? I would argue that more industry participants constrain subsidies...Meaning, if iphone was available to more carriers, the price would drop and subsidies would drop as many analysts had covered last week.
6) wholesale is a vibrant business for all and everyone offers different pieces of the values ... Sprint has been the most aggressive here. Other carriers have followed...VZ with Tracfone's staighttalk is a serious competitive threat to AT&T...Wirelessly attached devices represents a significant growth area - last i checked, these OEMs like carrier choice. It's a good business to be in.
7) and what the hell does driving them into the ground mean? Zip? Done? Nada? niche focused? regional? or wholesale focused? or?
The thing that is affecting T-Mo is a weakened parent company and T-MO usa with the failing to recognize the need to build a data network (through increased spectrum depth). Sprint's issues are street cred and merger debt.
It pains me when techies mix half baked economics into an analysis that is predisposed against a carriers...ohh the headaches.
They are very different things. Wireless saturation has to do with how well the technology is implemented, and how frequently the stations are available, and overall spectrum available.
All of these things have a lot of tuning that can be done to get more and more and more bandwidth. Gas is a finite resource we pump out of the earth. Electricity can be like network bandwidth when we use ocean hydro or wind, but we mostly use coal.
They can up the network bandwidth A LOT, without the expenses associated with upping the gas pumping.
Dont make excuses for our carriers to be lazy and greedy for them. We should be considering a wireless monopoly at the HW level only, and making it a sales free for all on top of that with service.
All of these providers are screwing up the future telecommunications position of our country by their short sighted and lazy ways.
Bandwidth can be managed with caps, but neutrality means the end of price discrimination: the ability to charge different prices per unit of traffic based on different usage. That is the underlying driver of insane SMS margins and paltry data margins if you compare them dollars for bit. There is no analogy to the utility world: it'd be like paying a higher price for drinking water and a lower one for shower water out of the same pipe; just because drinking water delivers more value per liter.
It means you can't charge me different amounts for different bits at the same time, or block certain bits altogether.
Jason
The future in my opinion is also new technologies that leverage server-side rendering and heavy lifting.
Browsers like Skyfire are reducing network bandwidth by 70% using this method.
Why can't we expect this to continue with other services?
Hint: pricing is born of what the market will bear
Indeed, you'll find that if you explore the notion that Internet traffic (inter-carrier traffic) vs. intra-carrier traffic and the eventual model of inter-handset traffic and task/offering specific radios then the pre-hand wringing here over a data plan charge is slightly myopic.
Lastly, please consider that the majority of uses for handsets might be on the private backhaul reseller picocell market and/or MVNO market, femtocell per carrier market, or the increasingly common use of WiFi due to the inabilty of the 3G network to anticipate growth and demand (see: AT&T).
What? Is your assertion that Google serves video? No, they do not. You're fired!
I call BS. If this were the case, then why on Earth would AT&T allow the iPhone YouTube app to be included as one of the pre-installed apps? One of the first things I did with my new iPhone is watch a couple of YouTube videos. AT&T has been very successful at keeping a few apps that it considers "harmful to their network" out of the iTunes App Store. I would think if YouTube were so expensive for them, we wouldn't be seeing an app dedicated solely to it pre-installed on the iPhone
the cost of transmitting this data is vanishingly small, that the system will grow along with the customer demands, and we'll only need to pay more if we buy into the bullcrap the telcos try to sell us, namely that we need to pay for each and every electron used to send data to and fro.
ELECTRONS are CHEAP!