Americans cutting cell costs, plan to reduce further
March 23, 2009/
The more telling finding, though, is that 40 percent said that they planned to cut their cell phone if (read: when) the recession gets deeper. This is the natural progression of events during a financial downturn. People look for areas where they can save money. One is to cut back on the amount of time spent on the phone, or at least find a better value for doing so. Consumers can turn to prepaid to reduce their overall phone costs.
“The U.S. cell phone marketplace is undergoing fundamental changes that will just get bigger as the economic downturn deepens,” Allen Hepner, a scholar at the New Millennium Research Council, said in a telephone news conference Thursday. “What we see in this survey is clear evidence that most consumers will keep a cell phone during this recession, but only after shifting to less expensive cell phone plans.”The latest available figures have prepaid covering 17 percent of the U.S. cell phone market. That could change big time once the Q1 2009 numbers are released. Seventeen percent of contract cell phone users have switched to prepaid within the past six months, and given the grave state of affairs to start the new year, we could see another 10 percent switch in the first quarter alone. As I discussed with Boost Mobile VP Neil Lindsay on the Prepaid Podcast, this could cause an eventual paradigm shift in the U.S. Once people are on prepaid and realize the benefits, perhaps the U.S. will join the world in celebrating the value of prepaid wireless.]]>
Posted in Consumer Issues
This is not the first article in the same vein to show up here recently…
The fact of the matter is that most people will benefit from looking closely at their cell phone contracts. A lot of people have usage that would better be served with a prepaid phone. The restrictions placed on minutes by most contracts means a lot of people pay for minutes they do not use, or they pay overage charges when they go over their minutes. The flexibility of prepaid means the consumer can eliminate this waste of money. And let’s face it, who can afford to waste money nowadays?
Prepaid phones are also cheaper per minute up to a certain threshold. But this threshold has all but disappeared with the introduction of very competitively priced ‘unlimited’ plans. Just watch out that the prepaid phone do not charge a ‘daily use’ charge. Those work out quite expensive.