The War of The Carriers

The War of The Carriers

For those of you who haven't noticed the endless amount of advertisements that the four major carriers Sprint, At&t, Verizon, and T- Mobile have put forth to the general public. The ads all try to depict how they are the company has best cellular service option. I cant help but notice how this is forcing cellular companies to change in a radical way. This is incredible for customers there has never been a time where they have gotten so much for most times just simply being a customer. These freebies include international long distance, international text, and cloud storage space. This continuous need to change ultimately all began when T-mobile announced they no longer were going to offer service contracts a move that took the cellular service industry by storm. A benefit of T-mobile decisions they could list the price of just service in their advertising which most of the general public assume that they had lower prices which in a way they did.  T-mobile because of its genius marketing move started gaining customers rapidly. The other companies were caught off guard by T-mobile’s actions and started to scramble. The scramble led to the companies changing the way their plans were structured especially Verizon and At&t. They no longer offered plans revolving around talk time and started to offer plans around data. Wait, one might ask the question with the wide spread popularity of smartphones since the iPhone 4S (widespread meaning a majority of people had smartphones) shouldn't have the data became the most important part of the cellular plans a long time ago. Well up until a year ago that wasn't the case for the cellular companies. However the elimination of contracts wasn't the move T-mobile made the greatest impact on the industry, It was the introduction of the buy-out program. The buyout program was t-mobile's guarantee that if you switch to them that they would pay off your earlier termination fee. This gave customers the ability to leave their current carrier whenever they chose and thus other cellular companies now really had to worry about losing their customers. Soon after the other companies choose to implement some type of reward incentive to switch to their company. Then on the companies started doing the only other thing they could do which was price cut. Several price cuts have actually been preformed by all the companies. In the end as the current state of the cellular world is great for customers but seemingly not for the companies.