How many users actually benefit from $99 unlimited?

Ben Skversky wrote:
> In my job, I go as far west on the Pa. turnpike to Harrisburg, Pa., on the
> NJ turnpike I go as far north to Fort Lee, NJ. I have no problems with
> T-mobile.

Yes, T-Mobile seems to work very well in the eastern U.S.. My mother
switched to T-Mobile prepaid in Florida after AT&T/Cingular converted
her from TDMA/AMPS to GSM and increased the monthly rate by 40%. She
started a movement among her senior friends when they found out how
little she was paying. However now she uses OneSuite for long distance
at 2.5¢/minute, where before she could use free N&W on AT&T.

In the western U.S., T-Mobile took over the horrid Cingular/Pac Bell
1900 MHz GSM network, which has poor coverage. They've been trying to
improve things, but have run into a lot of opposition to suburban cell
sites. Still, it's slowly improving. Sometime in 2008 I should get
coverage at my house, but there are still a lot of areas of the Bay Area
with coverage holes, much more than with Verizon or AT&T.

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:56:57 -0800, SMS <scharf.steven@geemail.com>
wrote in <47bde4e5$0$36327$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net>:

>In the western U.S., T-Mobile took over the horrid Cingular/Pac Bell
>1900 MHz GSM network, which has poor coverage. They've been trying to
>improve things, but have run into a lot of opposition to suburban cell
>sites. Still, it's slowly improving. Sometime in 2008 I should get
>coverage at my house, but there are still a lot of areas of the Bay Area
>with coverage holes, much more than with Verizon or AT&T.

Nonsense. The old Cingular now T-Mobile actually has good coverage.
Will you stop the trolling when you finally get coverage in your house?
Or must your wife get coverage at work too? ;)

--
Best regards,
John Navas <http:/navasgroup.com>

"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea - massive,
difficult to redirect, awe inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind
boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." --Gene Spafford

Todd Allcock wrote:

> I think she's used 10 minutes in the last 12 months. (Thank you,
> T-Mobile, for a $10/year minimum refill policy!) ;-)

Well maybe Richard meant that if those family members had had cell
phones when they were between 20 and 50 years old!

My mother's also on T-Mobile prepaid and probably uses 20 minutes a
month. She went from $50 a month on AT&T to about $2/month on T-Mobile.
First she got conned into switching from AT&T TDMA to AT&T GSM, which
resulted in loss of coverage at the places she travels to the most as
well as higher prices, then Cingular took over and raised the prices
again. She was most concerned about having to learn to use a new handset
and re-enter her contacts, so I walked her through unlocking her Nokia
handset.

The downside is that she has no T-Mobile coverage at my house in
suburban Silicon Valley or at my sister's house in suburban Atlanta.

On Feb 21, 11:53*am, SMS <scharf.ste...@geemail.com> wrote:
> For the cost of one of those $99 unlimited plans (which will be about
> $115 after taxes and fees), you could buy about 2150 minutes on a
> prepaid network (at about 5.3¢ per minute). That's about 35 hours a
> month. Other than certain business people, i.e. realtors, field service,
> etc., how many users actually use over 2000 minutes per month?
>
> PagePlus charges as low as 5.3¢/minute for voice, and as low as 3.5¢ per
> text message (when you buy the $80 "1400 minute" card at a discounted
> price of $74). They also offer unlimited voice minutes for $2.49 a day,
> or $75 for a 30 day month.
>
> It seems that too many consumers look at the "unlimited" part, without
> understanding that $99 is a) not really $99, and b) not such a great
> deal compared to non-unlimited plans, and c) a lot more than they have
> to pay for unlimited voice.

I think that with a low enough price point that unlimited becomes
useful for those who want to drop a landline and go all cellular all
the time.

Unfortuantely I think that getting Magic Jack is a bigger bang for
the buck in dropping a old fashioned landline then trying to cut the
cord using a cell phone plan. You can't beat unlimited calling in the
US and Canada 24 X 7 for only $20 a year. Plus you get all those
advanced phone services thrown in for free also .

Magic Jack is one kick ass phone company when it comes to net cost!
Now if AT&T could drop the cell bill to only $20 a year that would be
something.

SMS wrote:
> Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>
>> 35 cents a minute? Gawd! If my mother or my stepmother had lived to
>> see cell phones, they would have talked sixteen hours per day and the
>> family would have been bankrupt!
>
> 35¢ a minute is actually pretty low for overage charges.
>
> That's actually one of the big advantages of prepaid, you don't pay
> outrageous overages, you just pay the normal per minute rate. Prepaid is
> available on Verizon's network for as little as 5.3¢ per minute.
>
> Sprint had a deal for a while that got rid of the huge overage charges,
> called "Fair and Flexible."
>
> It's a double-edged sword for the carriers. If they made the overages
> reasonable then subscribers would be less careful about going over, and
> use more than their plan minutes without much concern. However that
> would cause some subscribers to move to lower tiers, which would cost
> the carrier money.

But frankly I find the business model of raping customers when they go
over just plain wrong. Just imagine if other services operated in a
similar fashion. Say you needed to cross a bridge every day and you
could buy a monthly pass that cost say $50 that entitled to cross once
each day. You are a loyal customer and have been using the bridge for
years. Some event happens where you need to cross more often and they
charge you $7 for each additional crossing. I doubt anyone would put up
with it.

Cell phones are no longer something magical. The days of having to
accept whatever is offered are winding down..

SMS wrote:
> Ben Skversky wrote:
>> In my job, I go as far west on the Pa. turnpike to Harrisburg, Pa., on
>> the NJ turnpike I go as far north to Fort Lee, NJ. I have no problems
>> with T-mobile.
>
> Yes, T-Mobile seems to work very well in the eastern U.S.. My mother
> switched to T-Mobile prepaid in Florida after AT&T/Cingular converted
> her from TDMA/AMPS to GSM and increased the monthly rate by 40%. She
> started a movement among her senior friends when they found out how
> little she was paying. However now she uses OneSuite for long distance
> at 2.5¢/minute, where before she could use free N&W on AT&T.

That would be except in the large region of the eastern US that I am in.
A tmobile phone is a paperweight here if you go a few miles away from
the interstate.


>
> In the western U.S., T-Mobile took over the horrid Cingular/Pac Bell
> 1900 MHz GSM network, which has poor coverage. They've been trying to
> improve things, but have run into a lot of opposition to suburban cell
> sites. Still, it's slowly improving. Sometime in 2008 I should get
> coverage at my house, but there are still a lot of areas of the Bay Area
> with coverage holes, much more than with Verizon or AT&T.

Ben Skversky wrote:
> In my job, I go as far west on the Pa. turnpike to Harrisburg, Pa., on the
> NJ turnpike I go as far north to Fort Lee, NJ. I have no problems with
> T-mobile.
>
>
>
> "SMS" <scharf.steven@geemail.com> wrote in message
> news:47bdafd6$0$36367$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net...
>> Ben Skversky wrote:
>>> Great post. You are 1000% correct. I don't even need the 1000 minutes I
>>> get from T-mobile, but I'm only paying $39.99 & that includes free nights
>>> & weekends.
>> Yes, T-Mobile is a great deal for a lot of peak minutes. Unfortunately
>> they have no coverage yet where I live, and poor coverage where I usually
>> travel to.
>>
>> I pay $30 for 300 minutes and unlimited N&W on Verizon, and I just don't
>> get into long gab fests during peak times.
>
>
Can I suggest that isn't much of a test? I think every carrier has the
PA & Jersey pike lit up.

4phun wrote:
> On Feb 21, 11:53 am, SMS <scharf.ste...@geemail.com> wrote:
>> For the cost of one of those $99 unlimited plans (which will be about
>> $115 after taxes and fees), you could buy about 2150 minutes on a
>> prepaid network (at about 5.3¢ per minute). That's about 35 hours a
>> month. Other than certain business people, i.e. realtors, field service,
>> etc., how many users actually use over 2000 minutes per month?
>>
>> PagePlus charges as low as 5.3¢/minute for voice, and as low as 3.5¢ per
>> text message (when you buy the $80 "1400 minute" card at a discounted
>> price of $74). They also offer unlimited voice minutes for $2.49 a day,
>> or $75 for a 30 day month.
>>
>> It seems that too many consumers look at the "unlimited" part, without
>> understanding that $99 is a) not really $99, and b) not such a great
>> deal compared to non-unlimited plans, and c) a lot more than they have
>> to pay for unlimited voice.
>
> I think that with a low enough price point that unlimited becomes
> useful for those who want to drop a landline and go all cellular all
> the time.
>
> Unfortuantely I think that getting Magic Jack is a bigger bang for
> the buck in dropping a old fashioned landline then trying to cut the
> cord using a cell phone plan. You can't beat unlimited calling in the
> US and Canada 24 X 7 for only $20 a year. Plus you get all those
> advanced phone services thrown in for free also .
>
> Magic Jack is one kick ass phone company when it comes to net cost!
> Now if AT&T could drop the cell bill to only $20 a year that would be
> something.
>
But magicjack doesn't have a sustainable business plan. Also there is a
huge difference between a wireless carrier who has to have a massive
infrastructure compared to a VoIP provider who needs some equipment in
one location.

At 21 Feb 2008 13:06:23 -0800 4phun wrote:
>
> I think that with a low enough price point that unlimited becomes
> useful for those who want to drop a landline and go all cellular all
> the time.
>
> Unfortuantely I think that getting Magic Jack is a bigger bang for
> the buck in dropping a old fashioned landline then trying to cut the
> cord using a cell phone plan. You can't beat unlimited calling in the
> US and Canada 24 X 7 for only $20 a year. Plus you get all those
> advanced phone services thrown in for free also .


Magic Jack is an interesting option, but it's probably doomed.

The "$20/year" is a money losing proposition for them- they don't own their
phone numbers, so thy have "rent" them from a provider like Level 3 for
maybe $3 or even more depending on the amount of incoming calls. Then they
have to pay termination fees of $0.01-0.05/minute (depending on where you
call.)

Magic Jack is hoping to make it up on sales of banner advertising you'll
see on the softphone display, which may or may not cover their costs.

> Magic Jack is one kick ass phone company when it comes to net cost!

Sure. Anytime you give a product away, consumers will be happy! Magic
Jack will be a heck of a bargain...

....until the VC money runs out! ;-)


> Now if AT&T could drop the cell bill to only $20 a year that would be
> something.

Maybe after they start running 30-second commercials on your iPhone display
before and after each call they will!

4phun wrote:

> I think that with a low enough price point that unlimited becomes
> useful for those who want to drop a landline and go all cellular all
> the time.

Yeah, unless: a) you want to have DSL, in which case you may as well get
a landline anyway since the price difference between naked DSL and DSL
plus a landline is minimal, and b) you have kids or seniors that need
the 911 service of a landline.

Also, in natural disasters, often the wireless networks are overloaded
or go down, but landlines still work. During the bad hurricane season a
few years ago, we also saw that a lot of wireless sites had no back-up
generator, only batteries, so they went down pretty quickly. Cingular
had 25% of their sites with generators (according to their own press
release), while Verizon had 80% with back up power (Verizon claims to
have a generator at every site where they are allowed to have one).
Cingular's goal is to have enough sites up to provide complete coverage,
but to sacrifice capacity, "We will sacrifice the capacity piece to try
to attain blanket coverage as much as possible."

"http://telephonyonline.com/mag/telecom_signal_end_storm/"
"http://news.vzw.com/news/2006/03/pr2006-04-04a.html"

> Magic Jack is one kick ass phone company when it comes to net cost!
> Now if AT&T could drop the cell bill to only $20 a year that would be
> something.

How long do you think Magic Jack is going to survive at $20/year? It's
great while it lasts though. They'll probably be going the way of
SunRocket before long.