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Contracts allow you to get phones at MUCH cheaper prices. I work for AT&T so I know the cost, the retail, and the contract prices of every phone we offer. With the signing of the contract you get $200 off the price of a phone and only have a, now, DECLINGING $175 ETF.

Now that was for some of the comments left, as far as the gov. being exempt and no real reason left is not fair to the consumer. Now if it is for Government employees then I see fairness in it. Say a military or government employee is stationed or put in another country for their job and the country doesn’t have the carrier, then there should be no ETF. However, I think that should go for ANY employee of the workforce; NOT just government employees.

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@swissfreek The gov’t isn’t one big entity, but lots of ’smaller’ ones. House, Senate, Whitehouse, NSA, DoD, DHS, etc. Each of these groups maintain their own contracts with carriers. Also the gov’t isn’t paying full-price for a phone. Size matters.

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Having worked for many of the wireless carriers in my career, this has always been the case. Government has never paid for Early Termination Fees. Neither do members in active duty for the Armed Forces, Navy, Marines, etc.

As far as pricing, no they also do not pay full retail for the handsets. The higher up in the government you are, the less you pay, but it’s never full retail. They get better pricing than customers.

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another easy thing to do is if you’ve been with one provider for some 8+ years, mere mention “i’ve been a customer here for x years and this is how i get treated?”

my fam has been with att (cingular, cellone etc) for almost 20 years now and it’s super easy to get att to kiss your ass. i got the 8525 for 50 bucks when it was new, all i said was well verizon has a similar smartphone and they’re offering it to me for 50. att complied right away! we never paid an etf when my sister left for t-mobile (worst choice of her life) and we never renewed her contract when she joined back up to get the razr.

try and stay with a company for a while, it pays after a while.

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Oh and any large customer (big spender) is going to get a ton of flexibility in their pricing and ETFs.

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That idea does really make sense, but I think that would actually be worse for some.

All those customers who got their free upgrade where the phone is listed at 249.99 or more at no commitment would be basically putting there self out there so to speak when most carriers just offer a set fee.

Plus it’s less confusing as it stands now. It’s 175 standard for every customer with it dropping by 5 every month.

No need to explain to a customer why their one line with a Nokia 2610 will cost $195 to cancel and their line with the blackberry only $150 when they bought both phones at the same time. (Just as an example)

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Most of those accounts who have the ETF waived are on giant pooled plans where the first line will cost anywhere from 600-1000 for the line and will give say 20,000 anytime minutes and each additional line is 10 dollar flat fee. They void the ETF because just like another visitor claimed there is a lot of turnover as well as new hires so in the end it equals out. Not only that but most businesses get a discount based on the ammount there bill is every month it’s not always a set percentage so if they don’t meet a certain level that say for example 20% my drop to 8%.

Not to mention that busuiness/government does pay for equipment and services that do cost more.

They don’t normally get the type of discount a normal customer would get who was eligible for an upgrade or a new customer and for example the iphone data which is the same exact thing everyone has on their account with the current iphone 2G is paying $20 a month were as they pay $45 and that was before any enterprise email setup.

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the etf should just be the amount of the discount given on the device and should be lowered monthly based on the depreciation of said device.

at&ts new plan IMO is more legit than others.

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2) I bet the government pays more for the data plans. Not that the iPhone and Blackberry on AT&T have a rate for “consumers” and a rate for “enterprise users”. Which do you suppose the government is paying?

3) Imagine how much turnover there is in the government, and how often they would cancel the plans before the contract date?

4) The government probably has one massive contract, for which they pay a huge lump sum to get the services they require. They most likely don’t actually pay to open and close account on the fly. It costs the government X million dollars per year and Sprint/AT&T gives them what they need up to a certain limit. And if you do the math out, this is probably way more than it would cost for John Q. Public to do the same thing. There is support, security, extra software, etc. included in this. And by the way, when Sprint said it was going to shut down the IDEN (Nextel) network, the government stepped up and said “We want to keep it alive.”

The government typically pays much more than the rest of the world for things. So I think this argument about them not paying the ETF is probably fairly moot.

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Meh, it’s my own fault for not stepping in and getting involved. Her friends all told her Sprint was best in NYC.

Don’t you believe it.

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