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Think there will be a price war for service vz vs att?

B

brinycbri

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 13, 2007
514
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Man, I hope att will start slashing service prices to entice customers because I would rather go to vz if the prices were the same. anyone think there will be a price war or is apple going to say no to it
 
No. There hasn't been a price war to entice iPhone users to jump ship and get the newest droid. Monthly service for both is around 80-100. Either you stay with AT&T and continue paying 99ish a month or you jump ship and pay them the 350 ETF and continue paying 99ish to verizon instead. They both win. Youre the one that loses. :)
 
i doubt it, carriers tried the price war thing early on in the cell phone world, and bottom line is you can really only go so cheap, instead carriers went the opposite way, kept the prices the same and started offering value ad incentives that cost them nothing on top of normal operating cost. so while there might be a slight decrease in pricing there won't be much of a war and the cause of these adjustments won't just be the iphone, it will be the overall goal of getting more customers. if anything you'll probably see things like

early nights and weekends become the norm
additional minutes


those are things that cost carriers nothing up front but give customer the illusion of getting more,
 
We all hope so but highly unlikely. Once prices go up in in either of the big two, usually the other follows suit. AT&T might reduce prices sightly to keep people from jumping ship but I think most are locked into their contracts anyways.
 
my guess is No ... both will be so close in price, not worth changing carriers.

In Canada here ... iPhones are the same no matter what carrier you sign with.

just like Gas prices ... Big Oil says, there will be no deals had ... period.
 
Neither AT&T nor Verizon will do anything that saves customers a significant amount of money.

Will one drop a price a little? Sure. But that is about it. Both companies know the next iPhone will sell BIGTIME whatever the price and they also want as much money as possible.

Neither will drop their service or phone into a territory that makes the other side go WOW.

Just my 2 cents
 
At the very least, I want them to have a data package war.. see who can offer more data for the same price.
 
Unlikely. Both have too much market power / market share. Oligopolies often don't compete on the basis of price.
 
To add to some of the posts above, because Verizon and AT&T have such a large market share (which will be even larger with the T-Mobile merger), combined with the incredible consumer demand for iPhones, it is likely that each carrier will engage in price competitions to see who can raise service costs the most or slash service components (data, messaging, etc.) without losing subscribers to the other.
 
If there is a price war between VZW & ATT, it is more likely to be in the lines of who can offer the least service for the most money. We've already seen AT&T do away with their unlimited plan and VZW's unlimited plan is only for a limited time.
 
More likely both AT&T and Verizon will raise prices. AT&T will cause they are gobbling up T-Mobile, and Verizon just to match it. They will basically be the only two carriers, so if people don't like either one of them they won't have much choice.
 
I think both companies realize that the cost of slashing prices is not worth increasing the customer head count. Heck both companies are raising the cost of ownership thanks to setting up tiered data plans.
 
I think there will be a price war on who can get away with charging more for less.
 
There already is competition regarding packages and pricing.

ATT will provide unlimited data if you play your cards right and are a multiline user.
They also just offered the 30 dollar unlimited text plan for EVERY phone on your family plan (up to 5 for the one fee.) Kicker is, this unlimited text plan also offers unlimited mobile phone to mobile phone calling for every phone on your family plan (any carrier, any time.) Right now, the packages are pretty damn good, and they keep getting better. Competition is a good thing.
 
Not going to happen.

The wireless phone business is an oligopoly. That is to say, large companies with few competitors and a high barrier to entry for new competitors. Oligopolistic companies ordinarily do not compete on price, but rather compete on service/features.

This is why you usually do not see an AT&T or Verizon ad saying, "Hey... look at our low prices we are much cheaper than the other guys." Their ads usually tout better features and service.

Automobile companies are another example of oligopolies. Watch their ads. They almost always focus on features and service and not price. You normally won't see a Ford ad saying, "Come buy a Ford truck because it is cheaper than a Chevrolet truck." You may see price competition at the dealer level, but a car dealer is not the auto company.
 
old-wiz said:
More likely both AT&T and Verizon will raise prices. AT&T will cause they are gobbling up T-Mobile, and Verizon just to match it. They will basically be the only two carriers, so if people don't like either one of them they won't have much choice.
Click to expand...

This happened in Europe with Telefonica/Movistar.. I know it's different in the US but I'd just like to comment how the EU commissioners agreed on a 6.000 million euro fine because it was found that oligopoly companies had a pact on making their prices increase and both would have the same prices in order to have no competition between them. So, they basically had an agreement so that none would have to slash their prices and would instead increase them so as to increase their profits without any downside. Unfortunately I'm certain that this 6k mi eur fine was less than what they actually made with that pact. I hate teleco oligo/monopolies...

I highly doubt their services are so expensive that they can't go below the $100 mark-- if I worked in any of these carriers I would try and compete with lower prices.. yet both have pretty much the same costs and are pretty static.
 
My guess is that in the coming years you will just see data charges on mobile phones, no voice, no text. It will all be considered "data". A 5 minute call will use a certain amount of data, a text message a certain amount of data.

The phone plan will be $X.00 for X Gigabytes of data, and you can use it however you like. There will be plan tiers for data, just as there are plan tiers for minutes today. It will become competitive, but by then there will be just a few major players. VZ and ATT will be the big dogs in the USA with a few minor players. T-Mobile is already likely to be absorbed by ATT, and I don't expect Sprint to survive much longer.
 
I hope there is a price war. For $15, AT&T is only giving 200MB ... which is a bit ridiculous in my opinion. I hope Verizon does $20 for 1GB like they do with their iPad plan. Hopefully it would convince AT&T to change, or at least offer 500MB for $15.

My point is, I hope there is a bit more flexibility in data plans ... whether it is on AT&T or Verizon.
 
no it will never happen. All they do is price match each other every few months. Their voice/text plans are almost always the same compared to each other. BTW verizon & AT&T have a lot of common employees. They flip flop between companies quite a bit.

Also with the tmobile acquisition it gives AT&T even less incentive to lower prices.
 
if you were to throw t-mobile and sprint into the mix then maybe we'd start seeing some more competitive prices like they have in Europe. But in a duopoly i can't see it happening. Maybe if Apple could get the iPhone on as many carriers as possible the carriers might have the incentive.
 
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