CELL PHONE CARRIERS AND THEIR AFFECT ON

CONSUMERSEhsanullah Wedee

Section 04

How does it affect us?

Cell phone carriers do everything in their power to make you sign a new contract.

Carriers purposely hold back updates to try and get consumers to renew their contract by upgrading phones.

How does it affect us?(cont.)

The end price for the consumer is driven up needlessly.

When new phones are released, support for the older phones decrease dramatically or becomes non-existent.

These are the many ways wireless

providers can affect us and how we use

our technology.

What do carriers do?

Wireless providers have been known to release phones later because they are waiting for a new feature.(recent cases include 4g LTE)

Holding back updates

Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint each are guilty of putting their own useless apps on any and every phone they can.

This takes up space in peoples cellphones, and in some cases slows them down.

These Useless apps not only take space, but it makes it hard for the manufacturer to issue an official update on time.

Newer phones results in decrease of support for older phones

Very recently with the Nexus S and Nexus S 4g, carriers delayed updates for 5 months.

Many believe that that this is to force people to sign a new contract.

Other phones

Virtually every android phone falls victim to the carriers because it is open source.

Price issues next!

Pricing

Price increases, as regulation increases. Despite Carriers making more money

from certain phones, price always increases.

Plan price also increases when you sign a new contract.

The US, and Canada are the most restricted when it comes to

Comparison of wireless plans worldwide

Canada Hong Kong India Japan Sweden UK US0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Wireless plan pricing

Total cost

What now?

Consumers end up using “root” or jailbreaking methods to update their device to the most recent firmware.

This breaks your warranty and is hard to undo.

Warranty killer

Wired.com. 2010. Wired.com. Piya Ganapati. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/mobile-plans-expensive-america/

Betanews.com. 2011. Betanews.com. Ed Oswald. http://betanews.com/2011/05/03/free-android-tethering-apps-now-blocked-by-nearly-every-us-carrier/