On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:50:32 -0700, Todd Allcock <elecconnec@AmericaOnLine.com> wrote:
> Having said that, unlike most carriers who seem to offer prepaid as a "last
> resort" for credit-challenged consumers, and at a price designed not to
> cannibalize their bread-n-butter postpaid biz, T-Mo aggressively pursues
> the pre-paid market, seeming to assume that anyone their prepaid offering
> lures from pstpaid is likely a high enough volume user that it'll be worth
> it. That seems to work for them, considering that their prepaid ARPU is
> (relatively) high, and their total ARPU is also relatively high considering
> their high percentage of prepaid customers compared to other carriers.

The cost to T-Mo for a prepaid customer is probably a lot lower than
their cost per post-paid customer. There is a customer support
organization for both, but all the freebies, billing, billing support,
payment processing, collections, etc. are only for post-paid.

The only ongoing costs for a "glove box" phone on prepaid are the
minutes that are actually used, and a tiny bit of the amortized
infrastructure necessary to deliver service (from the cell tower to
providing a means to refill the minutes). Probably the most expensive
(costly) t-mo prepaid customer is the one that buys a phone, uses the
allotted minutes just before they expire, then replaces the phone.

sdb
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