Attention, Wireless Carriers: Your Customers Know You’re Price-Gouging
Do you think you pay too much for your cellular phone service? Do you have serious concerns about the service in general? If you answered "yes" to one or both questions, you’re not alone.
WhistleOut(Opens in a new window) has a lot of skin in the game when it comes to how people feel about the prices they pay for mobile service. It's a search engine for cell phone (and internet) plans and deals, but that doesn’t take away from what WhistleOut found after surveying 1,000 US adults using Pollfish, as well as checking cell phone spending via the Bureau of Labor Statistics(Opens in a new window).
The key finding was that 38% of those polled plan to switch mobile plans in 2022. And with cell phone bills continuing to increase year after year, that number probably won’t change much in 2023: As of 2020, the average user paid $1,250 per year for cell service. That’ll go up to an estimated $1,471 per year for 2022.
It doesn’t help that people have legit complaints about the service they’re paying for. When asked how they feel, many respondents said they weren’t getting enough data allotment to use their phone as a hotspot, the data plan is too slow, and worst, the coverage they get is spotty.
The sweet spot for what people want to pay is something under $75 per month for a single-line. Even that’s not low enough for some—32% want to pay less than $50 per line per month. The only way to come close to that is to use a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), the kind that doesn’t own its own cell network like the big three (Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T) but licenses the use of those towers. (For more, read The Best Cheap Phone Plans for 2022.)
In the typical American phone plan, users are paying for multiple lines. Only 30% have one
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