The research firm has found that monthly prices are about two to three times higher and gigabyte rates are five to six times higher in markets with only three mobile network operators.
In contrast, a market with four mobile networks fosters healthier competition, resulting in lower prices for customers.
In markets with only three major network operators, consumers pay three times more for mobile plans with 100GB of data and also pay 60 percent more every month for fixed broadband services.
That’s perhaps the reason why the T-Mobile and Sprint merger made the US one of the most expensive markets in the world, even as prices of voice and data plans and broadband plans continue to fall across most European and OECD countries.
Before T-Mobile and Sprint’s merger in 2020, prices were falling in the US, but after that, prices either stopped falling completely or decreased at a lower rate.The findings were based on the monthly prices of plans with 50GB of data, 10 Mbit/s speeds, and at least 1,000 minutes.
This doesn’t align with a report from CTIA, which claims that the cost per megabyte of data decreased by a whopping 98 percent from 2012 to 2022.
Dish was meant to replace Sprint as the country’s fourth largest provider, notes Light Reading, but the company’s struggles keep it from becoming a threat to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, all of whom see price hikes as an important part of their strategy to boost revenue.
The increase in prices hasn’t impacted customer loyalty though, with all three carriers reporting historically low levels of churn (number of customers leaving a company) for the first quarter.
That doesn’t mean they are happy though, as made clear by a recent report that says some MVNOs rank higher for customer satisfaction than the three major network operators.
