Why the $10 charge on Smartphones. Explanation direct from Sprint...

[viber]

Sprint big dogs explain the exact reason for the $10 charge on smartphones

Sprint Nextel's CEO Discusses Q4 2010 Results - Earnings Call Transcript - Seeking Alpha

Daniel Hesse

First of all, the increase that we've added to our Any Mobile, Anytime and our other, if you will, Everything Plans of $10 a month, originally, we have them on our two very high-end smartphones and we expanded that to all of our smartphones. And fundamentally, what drove it was that smartphone users used a lot more of our network than non-smartphone users. And so our cost of service, if you will, was higher for smart devices that non-smart devices. So we very much wanted to keep our differentiation in the market and what keeps our customers satisfied and what we know they want, which is the simplicity of unlimited. And to be able to maintain that, we felt this was the right thing to do rather than go into a metered approach for those higher-end users. So that was really the driver. And I wouldn

 

[tqlla]

So we very much wanted to keep our differentiation in the market and what keeps our customers satisfied and what we know they want, which is the simplicity of unlimited

Translation.....4G fees coming soon.

 

[Rigmaster]

Translation - data consumption as a whole is going up as the phones increase in power and capability, but much of that consumption is still being done on 3G network. We have to account for that. 4G really is another separate story for later.