Changes are afoot in the mobile industry. We’ve been seeing a sea change with how T-mobile looks at their customers. They’ve been changing the contracts and potentially even eliminating them. They’ve separated the phone payment plan from the monthly access fees which is an imortant first step in completely separating the purchase of a phone from the carrier that provides the services. This will eventually reduce the amount of junk files installed because  the carriers can’t force the providers to install them. I think that the reason why the Nexus 7 isn’t on Verizon Wireless is that they are refusing to install the bloatware that the Verizon is trying to force upon Google. I think this is a good thing. Google has also filed a suit against VZW to force them to allow the Nexus 7 on their network. This is going to break the carriers power over the user. Carriers don’t want to be dump pipes for the internet. The wired and cable companies are actively fighting against this by puttng data caps on downloading content. At the same time they’ve experimented with this, the wireless providers have been much harsher. However, these caps weren’t a problem in the past. According to BGR a website that focuses on mobile issues has noted that the amount of data that wireless users has begun to regularly break the data caps. T-mobile has also offered all of their plans without datacaps. This will likely push many data users on verizon and AT&T to switch over to these networks. This will likely put more pressure on the carriers than they have experienced in over a decade. I look forward to this increase in competition especially since I refuse to go over my data caps and greatly limit the amount of data that I use over the wireless networks. I believe we’ll see some interesting changes in the future.

I think that these changes will also preclude the merger of T-mobile and sprint as the US market needs additional competition not less. I think that there will be changes in all of the companies marketing and product offerings, but likely T-mobile will be the largest winner with Sprint in second.