"It's the phones and the bad planning by upper management."

Funny you should mention that. USCC and other US carriers chose CDMA which never had a lot of phone choices to begin with. The company wants to have a limited selection of phones thanks to their network technology. GSM carriers don't care what kind of phone you're using and you can unlock all with software, if needed. What I'm getting at is USCC has "unhappy" customers with their lacking phone selection, but yet they steadfastly hold the line that you can only use a cell phone that they provide to you. They have this "award winning network" that only allows for about 20 phone models to access it. Just think how happy their customers would have actually been if they could have used unlocked phones on their network instead of a handful of low end models that they force upon you.