Whatever Happened To....
"Was it all just a lie?"
Hell yeah!
If you have to pay the same monthly bill whether you bought a subsidized handset or an off-brand handset, what's the incentive for a manufacturer to build off-brand handsets? There's not a significant advantage to the consumer, so they can't sell them- at least not in the CDMA world.
Once voice over LTE has traction, I think we'll start to see more non-Verizon handsets come available.
Azeron said:
...because people won't expect free or nearly free LTE handsets.
We're not going to see 20% adoption rates, or anything close to that, but once AT&T and Verizon both have LTE deployed in the 700 MHz band, and support voice over LTE nearly nationwide, it will be a relatively simple matter to for a handset maker to construct one handset that works on both networks- without support for legacy CDMA or GSM. Then we'll start to see some of the same interoperability benefits that GSM in Europe has seen and an unsubsidized model will likely emerge among early adopters.
As long as voice over LTE is still billed in strict megabytes (like todays data cards) and not "minutes + data" like current gener...
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