Despite numbers, trends, and graphs....sometimes it comes down to timing. The longevity of any carrier and it's plans can be affected by its offerings. There are so many unforeseen angles and scenarios and the cheesy-but-true butterfly effect can play a role as well.
Take into account prepaid-only MVNOs. Sprint has Virgin and Boost, T-Mobile has MetroPCS, StraightTalk tries to use everyone's waves and there's TracFone, Net10, Page Plus uses Verizon, Republic Wireless, AT&T has Cricket, Ting, etc......Getting kind of saturated out there.
Each major carrier has their post paid and pre paid sectors. Overall, some of the offerings are not that much different than others. I don't mean to cut down on options, but weed out redundant and low value options. Verizon might have one of the cleanest set of plan options out there right now with Edge, Contract, More Everything, Prepaid, that's it. Well, as long as you don't get caught up in mid-contract upgrade issues, plan changes that went too far one direction or get caught on a loyalty line, not to mention folks who fall into the Early Edge and Return cycle or any other non-advertised save-a-customer promos. Boost has a $30 2GB autopay ($40 without autopay) $45 10GB and $55 20GB and that's it. Simple. Why post paid? Because I can and have a different use for the offers it affords me. We prepaid? different use, lower priority, unlimited slow speeds, way lower price with a way cheaper mid-range phone. I would never buy a $600 phone on a limited prepaid network or ever if there was little chance of using it on another carrier.
BUT, it's an easy to understand rate format, BUT why doesn't Sprint just do this instead of creating a whole other image? There's still a difference between Sprint's post and prepaid coverage and features. I call this redundancy and to me redundancy is waste. However, I do kind of see their angle since Sprint is seen or was seen as a business carrier and Nextel was seen as a "working man's" carrier so I suppose Sprint having Boost prepaid to appeal to the more urban demographic might actually make sense. I use Boost on one phone due to...$30 a month and I have no issue with 20MB speeds (8MB video.) (I haven't gone over 2GB to see the throttle speeds yet.) And, it wasn't from a lack of coverage or signal...go figure right.
I guess in the end it comes down to how T-Mobile handles themselves right now with their growth and plans for the time coming when they won't have that growth as it gets stunted by lacking performance. And, you never know who is going to buy who out and merge, consolidate, or otherwise change the face of "The Big 4."
