ATT pricing Apple out?

T

Thuleman

Supreme [H]ardness
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Considering that all iPhone 5S variants are at least $50, if not $100 more on an ATT contract vs. other providers it does beg the question whether ATT is purposefully pricing Apple out, or is ATT so big that people will pay whatever for the iPhone just to stay on ATT's network?

iPhone 5S 16GB $199 at ATT with 2-year contract
$149 at Sprint
$99 at Verizon
$0 at regional carrier
 
I pay whatever to stay off Sprint, Verizon and regional carriers, yes. You answered your own question with that list of carriers.
 
Tsumi said:
CDMA hardware is generally cheaper than GSM.
Click to expand...

except in this case, where iPhone 5S (Verizon CDMA version) is actually superior to the iPhone 5S (GSM unlocked model)

(Verizon 5S supports CDMA and is unlocked, while the GSM unlocked model doesn't. both support the same LTE/3G bands)

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/iphone/iphone-faq/differences-between-iphone-5s-models.html




It could be AT&T pushing people towards Android/Windows phones.... you never know/can trust anything about their motivations, which is why I never trust whatever a salesman says...
 
You are a fool to think they are saving you money. You pay for it one way or another through hidden fees

You can Pay $80/$90 at Verizon/At&t and get Unlimited Talk/Text & 2GB data

Or pay $80 at T-Mobile and get Unlimited Talk/Text/unlimited non-throttled data
 
Pretty sure that Verizon price is a temporary promotion. They're selling the 5C and 5S for the same price on contract.
 
I'm still on AT&T's grandfathered in unlimited data plan, so it would probably take a lot to make me switch. Of course, Sprint and TMobile offer unlimited as well... but they are crap in this area ;-/ Also, heard nothing but terrible things about Sprint customer service.
 
Deinos said:
I'm still on AT&T's grandfathered in unlimited data plan, so it would probably take a lot to make me switch. Of course, Sprint and TMobile offer unlimited as well... but they are crap in this area ;-/ Also, heard nothing but terrible things about Sprint customer service.
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Sprint's unlimited data has a fineprint (possible throttle above 5GB if you are in top 5% usage)

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2457846,00.asp

you AT&T's unlimited data plan has a fine print too (possible data throttle over 3-5GB)
 
Domini said:
You are a fool to think they are saving you money. You pay for it one way or another through hidden fees

You can Pay $80/$90 at Verizon/At&t and get Unlimited Talk/Text & 2GB data

Or pay $80 at T-Mobile and get Unlimited Talk/Text/unlimited non-throttled data
Click to expand...

T-Mobile's Postpaid is actually pretty bad if you don't need unlimited data and only have one line. The 3gb plan is the only one comparable to any of the other 2gb plans and it's more expensive when you factor in the phone. (AT&T contract is $80 a month + $200 for a phone, Verizon $75 same $200 while T-Mobile is $60 for the plan and 27.50 for 2 years)
 
I'd love to switch from AT&T, but T-Mobile getting rid of corporate discounts kinda killed that.

After taxes my AT&T bill is still ~$85 with 3GB of data. I probably would have switched long ago but I have a Microcell in my house and they actually have LTE in Cincinnati.
 
AudioCow said:
Pretty sure that Verizon price is a temporary promotion. They're selling the 5C and 5S for the same price on contract.
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Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. They had a Mothers Day sale going on for the past week or two. I got my One M8 for $100 as well.
 
AudioCow said:
I'd love to switch from AT&T, but T-Mobile getting rid of corporate discounts kinda killed that.

After taxes my AT&T bill is still ~$85 with 3GB of data. I probably would have switched long ago but I have a Microcell in my house and they actually have LTE in Cincinnati.
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If you're paying 85$ with a discount......you'd still save 25$ a month or so by switching to T-Mobile.

Plus they pay early termination fees (you front the money and get a giftcard back in 2-3 weeks).


I have unlimited talk/text/2gb for 50-ish a month.


edit: I know that every major carrier gives those mini cell's for free if you complain enough to customer service, just make sure you say inside my house the signal is bad. Keep complaining and they give them free. I know this because when I did installs at Comcast or trouble calls, I have had to install those things for people who don't know what they even do.....
 
The $85 a month also includes the $15 device subsidy charge.
I didn't know any other carriers offered a Microcell. I thought it was AT&T only.
 
AudioCow said:
The $85 a month also includes the $15 device subsidy charge.
I didn't know any other carriers offered a Microcell. I thought it was AT&T only.
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at&t's microcell acts like a mini cell tower... you need to provide your own "backhaul" (through your existing DSL/cable connection)

t-mobile offers a signal booster.... that device tries to amplify existing t-mobile signals, and doesn't use your own "backhaul"
(if you have a t-mobile branded android/windows phone with wifi calling feature, then you don't really need a signal booster/microcell)
 
Any idea how much bandwidth the micro-cell sucks up? Does data over micro-cell count against the data plan?
 
Thuleman said:
Any idea how much bandwidth the micro-cell sucks up? Does data over micro-cell count against the data plan?
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It doesn't use very much, but it does count against you, even if you have AT&T U-Verse/DSL. I had AT&T and Sprint femtocells and, if I recall correctly, they used ~20 MB a month. If you have internet, most likely you have wifi, so the data usage would be for calls only. At the time (4 years ago), there were 5 Sprint phones and 3 AT&T phones. Sprint was free, and AT&T would have wanted money eventually. The only complaint we had was the range of the units and how even, if we used the femtocells, the mobile data would still count against AT&T's data cap despite essentially bringing your own data. Sprint is unlimited.

Since AT&T gave us that much issues, we winded up returning the femtocells and got six 3G amplifiers (all US major carriers) from Wilson Electronics. The Wilson Electronic recommended tech/reseller wanted us to buy 16 amplifiers. They drew out maps and showed us zones, etc, but neither my boss or I bought in. We don't need 3-4 bars everywhere; we just wanted no dead spots.
 
Sprint prices Samsung out, they marked up the Note 3 and S4 $50 higher than anyone else. It doesn't matter its just what carriers do based on where they sit and how they run their contracts. In sprints case its because they are in bad contract with apple and they need to move more iPhones then they can. When a big competitor like Samsung sells a new phone sprint has to mark the phone way up in price to try to stop people from buying them over iphones.

The cost difference between each phone is negligible and has nothing to do with the final price. The final price is always about other issues like demand, surplus phones, other contracts.

On top of that you need to consider if the current prices are temporary promotions or not.
 
paperwastage said:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sprint+apple+losing+money

not sure if it's true... maybe it is, maybe not

maybe it's a one-time infrastructure/training cost... or throwing more money after bad money / sunk cost
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It's hard to imagine what it could have been had Sprint accepted that initial Apple iPhone exclusive deal.

Sprint was the first carrier Apple made the iPhone exclusivity deal to before Verizon and then AT&T. AT&T was obviously the one who jumped on it. (Note: Dan Hesse became CEO after this stupid rejection.) The belief is that Apple wanted CDMA carriers due to qualcomm pushing CDMA and not having to design space for GSM sim chips. How much the iPhone played into the death of CDMA is immeasurable.
 
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CHANG3D said:
It's hard to imagine what it could have been had Sprint accepted that initial Apple iPhone exclusive deal.

Sprint was the first carrier Apple made the iPhone exclusivity deal to before Verizon and then AT&T. AT&T was obviously the one who jumped on it. (Note: Dan Hesse became CEO after this stupid rejection.)
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Sprint would have killed itself with the extra data load that the iphone would've produced
 
Domini said:
Sprint would have killed itself with the extra data load that the iphone would've produced
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Who knows? Had Sprint been smart enough to accept the deal, maybe Sprint could have been smart enough to bid in the 700 MHz FCC wireless spectrum auction in 2008.

Sprint has more towers up, but less coverage due to them relying on the PCS 1900 MHz band. They just now have 800 MHz for 3G/LTE; it took them long enough with that Nextel merger. The Sprint doesn't even have enough continuous chunk of the 800 MHz band either, which reduces bandwidth.
 
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