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Why are Cell Phone bills in the U.S. so high?

(This is my first post so bare with me on this)

 

So, you saw the title, why are these bills so high. I can't afford any more data! Well, there's so many different ways that the bills can get so high because of that. There's so many articles out there trying to explain the technical details and things like that, so I've compiled some and used actually a book (yes a book) that analyzes so many different things, but there was a section on this subject. So, without further ado, let's just jump right into it. (subscribe to Pewdiepie please).

 

First off, the fees. U.S. cellular, where I'm from boasts no fees and that other companies have hidden fees. Did you know that that marketing strategy is a bunch of B.S.? Yeah, it actually is. The United States government wants to tax cell phones, this isn't just recent, it dates all the way back to 2007. So they'll say that they are "Emergency 911 fee" "Federal Universal Fee" and so on. So what does that mean? These types of fees aren't the carriers fault, they have to pay them. This doesn't stop with government meddling in this.

 

There's a few things that the FCC regulates when it comes to Cell Phone Towers and such. First thing I want to talk about is what I call the "Band Wars" This isn't a battle of the bands style school of rock competition, this competition is won with money. Guess who has the best Bandwidth and Service. Sprint? nope AT&T wrong, T-Mobile, 2nd, but not close, that leaves one. Verizon, yes, Verizon. First is the Bandwidth Auction, where the FCC auctions off certain bands to the highest bidder, so Verizon won so many of those, then sold some of the lower ones to T-Mobile. Another thing is that the carriers had to pay licenses for certain bands too. There are currently 1900 licenses held for bands used for Cell Phones in the United States. So, should we just have an uprising just to make our phone prices cheaper? Not necessarily.

 

You all hear about Huawei and their spying and vying for 5G equipment. That costs you too, but not installation, upkeep and maintenance. Your cell network is nothing without Towers and equipment. These towers are expensive too, but the companies don't own them. Carriers lease their towers. That's right, they literally rent their towers from other companies. Verizon's rent cost $258 Million per year. That's not the end of it, T-Mobile had to pay $5.7 Billion in so many different things just for maintenance for the towers in 2016. Network access fees, roaming fees to other companies, and regulatory costs, that doesn't cover all of it. Now that, really is shocking.

 

We always want faster data, more and more and more data without limits, but that comes at a cost. In the Unites States, all combined carriers together reportedly had 15.7 Billion Gigabytes of data, let me do some math, so 15.7 Billion GB is 15.7 Million Terabytes. Let's convert that into Petabytes. That is 15,700 Petabytes of Data, in one year. That is so, so much data being transferred. So that isn't your fault that it's so expensive, it's so much data to be handled in one year. So, can you please use less data, for the good of everyone.

 

Will we ever get a break from these expensive phone bills? Probably not. We always want newer and more, so that will cost more in turn. So, Unless you wanna not have 5g, your phone bill will probably be more expensive as time goes on.

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You obviously havent looked at Canada's cell phone plans then if you think those are bad

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7 minutes ago, Slottr said:

You obviously havent looked at Canada's cell phone plan then if you think those are bad

lemme see

 

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IDK both my boost mobile and virgin mobile plans, ( sprints network ) work fine for me for $35-$40 a month and support the newer devices and the speed is plenty fast for anything i would want to do on a mobile device to begin with.

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2 minutes ago, FlappyBoobs said:

It really makes no sense I can get truely unlimited data and unlimited calls for the equivalent of 22 usd a month here in Denmark. And it's not some crappy service either, I get 160mb/s downloads on my phone! 

but you have to take into account the entire country of denmark is prob. smaller then the state i live in.

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3 minutes ago, FlappyBoobs said:

It really makes no sense I can get truely unlimited data and unlimited calls for the equivalent of 22 usd a month here in Denmark. And it's not some crappy service either, I get 160mb/s downloads on my phone! 

None of our internet-y things make sense honestly. My mom has herself, my sister, and then me on an unlimited plan (technically supposed to throttle at 33GB but it does it at random) and each line is 25 bucks. Yet an unlimited data cable plan would be almost 150 bucks. Granted the speeds would be considerably higher since you don't have to deal with how piss poor our LTE is here, but still.

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5 minutes ago, xxEMOxx said:

but you have to take into account the entire country of denmark is prob. smaller then the state i live in.

I pay that amount and can roam across Europe and get similar speeds without paying extra (limited to 30gb a month outside of Scandinavia). 

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My personal cell is grandfathered into my original plan from like 10 years ago.  I cant upgrade my phone (but it has internet, browser, pr0n, youtube, nav, text, talk, etc etc etc its just an old Gen 1 android)...but

 

I pay $24.99 a month non taxed for unlimited data @ 3g and 300 calling minutes a month and unlimited texts.

 

People ask why I don't upgrade my old near Nokia smartphone - its fiscally irresponsible to do so.  I mean my pr0n shows up in 360p but whatever!

 

 

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Have you ever looked at how big the United States is? Have you ever considered that major carriers have to build and maintain infrastructure to cover as much of that as reasonably possible, all the while still paying for labor costs, marketing, customer support, legal protection, public relations, etc?

if you have to insist you think for yourself, i'm not going to believe you.

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20 bucks a month, 2GB data w/ Mint Mobile

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It really depends on your needs whether or not it's expensive.

For example, mine cost me $15 per month... But I don't have any data and I've got 100 minutes of talk time + 100 text messages... Because I rarely use my phone as a phone and most of everywhere I go to has free wifi.

 

If you bring your own device and don't need a high end plan, it's somewhat affordable...
But then if you choose a top of the line phone like the Samsung S9+, you'll be expected to pay like $100 per month for 10GB of data with unlimited text/call throughout Canada. If you bring your own device, the cost drops to about $75 per month.. (That's with Videotron... With carriers like Telus, it's $90 for 4GB of data and you also have to bring your own device...)

All in all, we're getting ripped off, prices keep going higher and higher instead of dropping. Nothing new.

Do mobile carriers REALLY need to spend a ton of money on marketing? We get it, you exist, I don't think anyone was questioning it. Stop wasting money so you can stop raising prices damn it.

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1 hour ago, TaycoFlayco said:

We always want faster data, more and more and more data without limits, but that comes at a cost. In the Unites States, all combined carriers together reportedly had 15.7 Billion Gigabytes of data, let me do some math, so 15.7 Billion GB is 15.7 Million Terabytes. Let's convert that into Petabytes. That is 15,700 Petabytes of Data, in one year. That is so, so much data being transferred. So that isn't your fault that it's so expensive, it's so much data to be handled in one year. So, can you please use less data, for the good of everyone.

 

Now divide those 15.7 million TB  by 266 million of mobile phone subscribers in US (according to a 2017 value reported by Google)

 

I'll make it easy for you .... that's 0.059 TB per subscriber per year or 59 GB per year... or 5 GB per month or ~ 160 MB per day ... or 2-3 youtube videos per day.

 

It's nothing.

 

// a large majority of that traffic is basically free for those providers, as they have antennas connected by fiber optics and then linked to internet exchanges in various locations around us... for some traffic they may even get paid  (see netflix) so don't cry for these phone providers

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its simple.

Verizon if you rsomeone like me with a buisness account and over 8 phones linked to one account, all have unlimited Data, talk and text

if its 1-2 people verizon isnt worth it due to its price, even know its better then all the others

so in that case you go to something like AT&T because Fuck sprint.

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56 minutes ago, Suika said:

Have you ever looked at how big the United States is? Have you ever considered that major carriers have to build and maintain infrastructure to cover as much of that as reasonably possible, all the while still paying for labor costs, marketing, customer support, legal protection, public relations, etc?

Should I add something on that

 

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1 hour ago, xxEMOxx said:

IDK both my boost mobile and virgin mobile plans, ( sprints network ) work fine for me for $35-$40 a month and support the newer devices and the speed is plenty fast for anything i would want to do on a mobile device to begin with.

In my state, nobody has any of those because they aren't that great, i'm looking at overall.

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1 hour ago, FlappyBoobs said:

It really makes no sense I can get truely unlimited data and unlimited calls for the equivalent of 22 usd a month here in Denmark. And it's not some crappy service either, I get 160mb/s downloads on my phone! 

 

https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/4017882057

We have so many more people and land coverage to cover.

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In France, my mobile plan costs me 5€/month, for unlimited talk time and sms + 30GB/month of data + roaming in europe

 

High prices in USA might be related to the size of the country and maybe a lack of concurrence ;)

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17 minutes ago, m4x1m3 said:

In France, my mobile plan costs me 5€/month, for unlimited talk time and sms + 30GB/month of data + roaming in europe

I feel really lucky too, in italy basically the same 4G+ for 5,99€ month today

Bless also EU I guess, even if here in Italy phone companies used to add fees everywhere 15 years ago, until the state forced companies to lower the prices for the ridiculous situation where you had to pay every time you did recharge the credit

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God i wish i could pay like $6-$7 USD for wireless, at least then I wouldnt feel terrible about buying a $400-$600 phone that will be useless in a year, if it even lasts that long!

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1 hour ago, Suika said:

Have you ever looked at how big the United States is? Have you ever considered that major carriers have to build and maintain infrastructure to cover as much of that as reasonably possible, all the while still paying for labor costs, marketing, customer support, legal protection, public relations, etc?

You haven't watched any Level1 coverage on this issue, haven't you? Or researched yourself? I know more than you then. Telecommunication companies got de-regulated back in late-90s. Meaning that they saved money to be used in upgrading infrastructure. They would have had all the money they needed to do it. But they didn't, and current government doesn't have balls to enforce those old contracts. Main reason for throttling and them not allowing actual high speeds is that infrastructure can't handle it.

 

Here's old Tek Syndicate video where Wendell explains it

 

Its true that smaller countries have it bit easier. But our governments also have balls to keep companies at their feet. If someone doesn't follow rules and keep upgrading, they get thrown away pretty quickly. Even if there would be situation where no publicly traded company would be willing to spend money, capitalism would bring another one in their place. And gaining monopoly-ish situation for 5 million user country is kinda significant thing.

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5 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

You haven't watched any Level1 coverage on this issue, haven't you? Or researched yourself? I know more than you then. Telecommunication companies got de-regulated back in late-90s. Meaning that they saved money to be used in upgrading infrastructure. They would have had all the money they needed to do it. But they didn't, and current government doesn't have balls to enforce those old contracts. Main reason for throttling and them not allowing actual high speeds is that infrastructure can't handle it.

 

Here's old Tek Syndicate video where Wendell explains it

 

Its true that smaller countries have it bit easier. But our governments also have balls to keep companies at their feet. If someone doesn't follow rules and keep upgrading, they get thrown away pretty quickly. Even if there would be situation where no publicly traded company would be willing to spend money, capitalism would bring another one in their place. And gaining monopoly-ish situation for 5 million user country is kinda significant thing.

I thought you were talking about me for a minute. I know a lot about that act and it ticks me off.

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$1 per 100MB or day at EDGE speed

 

Amateurs.

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