Well they HAVE stopped rolling out new cities… Yes they say they are gonna double it, but I am still waiting…NO 3G where I live and we aren’t a small city either.

While competitively, it may be a simple thing to lower the price….anyone who took an Economics classs can understand why this is not so simple. By all accounts, T-mobile is the most price-minimzing company in the industry. With 8 JD Power awards (more than any other carrier) in customer service, they are no slouch when it comes to treating their customers with loyalty and respect.

Just because they are smaller does not mean that they do not have the right to charge fair market value for their products. Do a coverage check before you buy it and quit whining….every company has its opportunities. What every company does not have is an aspiration to value employees and customers higher than the botton line. T-Mobile is the only carrier that has not announced company-wide lay-offs or some insane merger…so I think they are doing pretty darn good.

T-Mo is late to the data services game because of FCC “red tape” when they acquired the AWS 1700 spectrum. The other major player who acquired AWS 1700 spectrum was vzw. Hold that thought for the moment.

So T-Mo has the 3G spectrum and has started deploying 3G services into it. If you look closely (sorry, don’t have citation here) you will see that the 3G services they are deploying are future-proofed for LTE later on with minimal capital reinvestment (i.e., 3G hardware deployed now can be upgraded to LTE later via software).

Now they currently don’t have major data customers (BB users, perhaps) but they probably have a lot of business customers (gsm works when you leave the country whereas EVDO usually doesn’t). As stated earlier, their competition is only other mobile service providers and those guys have already stabilized a price point for these data services. If you know a price is stabilized then projecting revenue is easier than in a competitive market. A first step would be to win over some of the competitions data customers into T-Mo data. Face it, business class is called business class because businesses will pay for the extra amenities while families and students sit in coach. I digress.

Now business customers are probably the highest probability to be lured over first because the coverage they are going to want (major metro areas, possibility of international coverage) happens to fit all the markets that T-Mo offers 3G data coverage into. Furthermore the influx of data customers is going to be acceptable to the network integrity, so T-Mo can test it at an acceptable rate. And getting their competitions dollars while simultaneously not paying the competition for sharing coverage allows them more revenue to reinvest into the network. Keep in mind that anyone who moves to this data plan is going to guarantee at least 1 year of subscription fees into T-Mo.

So all this puts T-Mo into a positive financial outlook. This is good for T-Mo customers because they’re not going to fold anytime soon.

A typical MP3 file is 14MB at 320kbps, so you would need to download 357 MP3s per month just to break the cap. To me that sounds like a power user. I assume a casual gamer who plays WoW 2-3 times weekly and surfs the web (slashdot, email, facebook, etc.) is probably never going to hit the 5GB cap. So this service might be good for you to do interactive web stuff wherever service exists but is not good for you if you’re bleeding edge (watching online episodes, streaming music, etc.). That’s what wired services are for (Fios, Cable, etc.).

If you take the above paragraph has real, and you assume that T-Mo offers lower plans (smaller caps with less dollars per month) you can speculate that eventually less-than-casual users will choose the T-Mo data plan over their current dial-up or DSL. More customers == more revenue.

I predict that as mobile service providers deploy improved data technology (3G into 4G/LTE) they will start to compete with wired providers at a consumer level. It’s true that current fiber and cable with docsis 3.0 can provide 10M/50M u/d but as the mobile providers release 3.5G (HSPA) and 4G (LTE) technologies the field of competition will become wider (In the future, Comcast vs. T-Mobile?).

So the note earlier of VZW with AWS 1700 spectrum… their long term plans are to evolve their network from CDMA to 4G GSM (LTE) technologies. This could mean that eventually the mobile service provider competition in the USA will be mostly GSM based, with Sprint the only non-GSM (WiMax) player. At the moment VZW doesn’t need to move quickly on their LTE plans, so they can just sit on the AWS 1700 spectrum they have. I predict that as at&t and T-Mo improve their network capacity and integrity VZW will play their AWS 1700 hand accordingly. Competition (usually) improves infrastructure and can have the side effect of (also) lowering prices, which is good for all of us.

So am I happy that I have to wait longer to ditch my fat cable company and move to a provider I like? Yeah, a little. When I look at it the above way it kinda makes sense and I feel that they’re probably making a good business decision.