The cheapest rate plans at Cingular and Verizon Wireless are $39.99 for 450 minutes, with free nights and weekends. Sprint PCS starts a little lower: $34.99 for 300 minutes. T-Mobile offers a $19.99 plan, but it’s only 60 minutes – with no nights and only 500 weekend minutes.
Prepaid service comes no cheaper. The truth is if you’re not a heavy mobile phone user, if you just carry one for emergencies, the carriers may not have much to offer you.
In fact, the plan Verizon Wireless recommends to new customers is 900 minutes for $59.99. Cingular offers the same deal, and both offer four plans above that, from 1,350 for $79.99, to 6,000 for $199.99, a 60-percent savings, per minute, from the cheapest plans.
Even the phone selections are geared to higher-end users: There are basic models, but most of the phones stocked by the carriers have instant-messaging capabilities as well as enhanced multimedia features, from MP3 ringtones to cameras.
For business users, there’s optional e-mail, BlackBerry and laptop Wi-Fi access. Even basic plans these days come with free nationwide roaming, but there’s also international roaming, priced by country, so you can use your phone just as easily in Brazil or in Bahrain.
Mobile phones have become indispensable, carriers say, and their products are designed to cater to the most demanding users.
“Customers are using their phones more and more for both voice and data services, and our price plans are reflecting more value for those customers,” said Cingular spokesman Martin A. Nee. “We’re seeing a lot more demand for all kinds of different services – everything from corporate e-mail to downloadable ringtones. … You also have high-resolution camera phones. … All of this is causing a tremendous increase in customers’ use.”
And the sheer number of customers is huge: 181.1 million as of Dec. 31, the Federal Communications Commission recently said – surpassing, for the first time, the number of landlines nationwide, 177.9 million. In some Southern states, such as Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, the shift has been even more dramatic. In Rhode Island, meanwhile, landlines still outnumber mobile phones, but only about 20 to 19.
The top carriers dominate the market. Nationwide, Cingular had 51.6 million subscribers as of June 30, and Verizon, which had led the industry until Cingular’s merger with AT&T last year, had 47.4 million. Sprint PCS had 26.6 million (not counting the 17.8 million since acquired by absorbing Nextel), and T-Mobile, 19.2 million.
Strong market concentration, experts will say, tends to homogenize the offerings, and in wireless service that’s even more evident, with minimal variation among carriers in the rates charged, the contract terms, and the features available, standard and for a fee.
Nextel’s once-unique offering, walkie-talkie service, is now available as “Push to Talk” from Verizon. And T-Mobile’s big selling point for frequent travelers, an international GSM network, is now offered, in some form or another, by all three of its major competitors.
Even at the high end of services, exclusivity doesn’t last long: Cingular’s Wi-Fi service, for example, has now been matched by Verizon’s VZAccess. And for music fans, Verizon’s VZWHub goes head to head with Cingular Sounds.
What remains are some distinctions in price – Cingular, for example, offers “rollover” minutes, while Sprint lets you avoid big overage fees with its “Fair and Flexible” plans, and T-Mobile offers better values for lower-end users – and network quality.
Overall, said Paul Andrade, owner of PA Wireless Solutions, which deals with T-Mobile and Sprint, the network quality with all the carriers is “definitely better” now than it was years ago, and “a year from now it’ll be better again, because they keep upgrading.”
But cell phones are now so essential, Andrade said, that people expect to always get good connections, even as everyone’s heavy usage stretches the networks’ capabilities.
“People rely on it too much,” he said. “It’s a wireless handset, so you’re going to have interference, you’re going to have dropped calls. That’s why most carriers will guarantee you coverage only for major cities and highways.”
Yet for Cingular and Verizon, especially, being known for the best network is key.
Verizon spokesman David Thomson, for example, noted that his company spends “a billion dollars every 90 days” on its network, nationwide, plus another billion per year on its data network, constantly upgrading its towers and adding new cell sites. (Cingular is putting $6.2 billion into its network in 2005, including about $250 million in New England.)
“A wireless phone is only as good as the network it’s on,” said Thomson. “You can have the best price plan and the coolest-looking phone, and if it doesn’t work for you, what good is that?”
