Stop buying phones and signing contracts with Carriers
Most people, when they think about phones, think about a carrier. That's because almost everyone phone currently on the market only work on one carrier and has all sorts of influence on the phone from the carrier. These are mostly geared towards things working out better for the carrier than the customer.
On top of that, each carrier get special made phones for their network, that has hardware that works on just their network, meaning that if you want to switch carriers, you have to get a new phone. Now, with cutting out hardware to work on all carriers, this doesn't save some costs in the cost of hardware for the phone, but the manufactures have 3 or 4 phones to support each carrier, meaning a lot more to produce and support.
The latest Google Nexus 6 phone, fully supports all the to US phone carriers from their 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks. It doesn't have any carrier built or imposed software on it. It is a phone that is built with the user in mind, not the carrier.
On top of getting phones that are tied to a carrier, we sign 2 year contracts for subsidized phones. This has been fairly beneficial for the most part between carriers and consumers because no one really wants to buy the latest smartphone outright as they cost $600 or more. Well, the point has come where we need to stop doing this and we need to start buying phone directly from the manufacturer and get them to stop building phones specifically for the carriers. There is so much wasted money going into the phones.
Motorola is now doing financing on their phones making them readily more available without needing to have the full amount to pay for phones upfront. I would like to see all the phone manufacturers start this same method and start getting their phones straight to the customers and bypass the middle man (carriers).
Once we all start buying direct from manufacturuers and stop going through carriers for their custom phones we will start to see better prices, better options and better competition. The carriers will then stop wasting time making custom phones and focus more on their networks and prices.
The big exception to this rule is the iPhones, as they are carrier independent, have no bloat or changes specific to a carrier. No features integrated into the device that talks back to the carrier saying when you activated certain features, like tethering.
In buying their phones, you also get stuck with all their apps and services they are pushing, which usually means they force out competitive items, for instance, Verizon blocked Google Wallet from there Galaxy Nexus because it competed against their Softcard service.
On top of that, each carrier get special made phones for their network, that has hardware that works on just their network, meaning that if you want to switch carriers, you have to get a new phone. Now, with cutting out hardware to work on all carriers, this doesn't save some costs in the cost of hardware for the phone, but the manufactures have 3 or 4 phones to support each carrier, meaning a lot more to produce and support.
The latest Google Nexus 6 phone, fully supports all the to US phone carriers from their 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks. It doesn't have any carrier built or imposed software on it. It is a phone that is built with the user in mind, not the carrier.
On top of getting phones that are tied to a carrier, we sign 2 year contracts for subsidized phones. This has been fairly beneficial for the most part between carriers and consumers because no one really wants to buy the latest smartphone outright as they cost $600 or more. Well, the point has come where we need to stop doing this and we need to start buying phone directly from the manufacturer and get them to stop building phones specifically for the carriers. There is so much wasted money going into the phones.
Motorola is now doing financing on their phones making them readily more available without needing to have the full amount to pay for phones upfront. I would like to see all the phone manufacturers start this same method and start getting their phones straight to the customers and bypass the middle man (carriers).
Once we all start buying direct from manufacturuers and stop going through carriers for their custom phones we will start to see better prices, better options and better competition. The carriers will then stop wasting time making custom phones and focus more on their networks and prices.
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