Sprint has just announced that customers activating mobile devices after January 30th will pay $10 more for data then Sprint customers do today. If you’re already locked in a contract then don’t worry, these price increases don’t impact you. If you’ve been itching to get that EVO 4G or Shift, then you’ve got a little less than 2 weeks to pick it up and save some money on your monthly bill. Sprint tries to justify this by quoting facts and figures such as: mobile data volumes are growing about 2.4 times faster than fixed broadband, smartphone penetration is expected to double over the next 4 years, and that 60 percent of Sprint’s postpaid CDMA handset sales (upgrades and gross adds) in third quarter 2010 came from smartphone sales compared with 58% in the Q2 2010, 57% in Q1 2010, and 49% in Q4 2009.
Listen, we get it, you need to charge more because more people are actually using for network for things other than calling and texting, but you better spend this increased income on actually improving the network you have today. AT&T is notorious for increasing their prices, but not actually spending any money on improving their network. It’s only after they get ridiculed by the media that they whip out their wallet and fork over some coin to infrastructure folks.
Best part about all this is that Sprint published a comparison chart [PDF file] showing how they rank against the other operators and they purposefully make themselves look bad when compared to T-Mobile, who let me remind you also has a “4G” network that does 21 Mbps today thanks to HSPA+ technology and will soon get an upgrade to 42 Mbps speeds by the middle of this year. Sprint, who uses Clearwire for their 4G network, has demonstrated they can do 90 Mbps with LTE … but the question is when exactly are they going to start using that technology and migrating away from WiMAX.