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Comment by winternett | Hacker News Reader

T-Mobile is purchasing Mint to fix pricing obviously. I've been fixed at $75 for my fake "unlimited" plan now for about 10 years and switching plans will somehow only make things more expensive... Now ads and shoddy apps eat up my bandwidth at 5G speeds every month so I get throttled when I work hardest on my device.

Even though Mint wasn't useful to me, T-Mobile buying them means that monopolies are getting away with consuming the competition to create a price fixed environment. Congress is too tied up investing based on insider information to ever protect our interests as consumers, so I'll just look forward to the day where I no longer need a mobile phone perhaps. :/

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Product differentiation for various markets and price discrimination are both common techniques that even a monopoly can use to extract more profit.

They know that not everyone would be able to afford the top tier of service. If Toyota were the only car company, they wouldn't only offer top end Lexus models. They would probably retain the various tiers, and simply try to capture the maximum consumer surplus at each tier.

There's no particular reason why a monopolist would want to remove a cheaper priced but lower functionality service, so long as it is profitable.

By integrating the businesses they might actually be able to find efficiencies and cost savings that make it even more profitable via economies of scale.

Whether those efficiencies end up as consumer savings is a question of how competitive the market is, but I don't see how this would necessarily harm the customer experience.

Might be able to reduce redundant storefronts, headcount, software as a service platforms, etc. Might be able to save money on employee benefits by leveraging larger group policies. They could do all of this while keeping things about the same or better for customers.

The only reason to actually eliminate the lower end of the pricing model is if it is unprofitable. Others would fill the space if they just killed it.

Why would a monopolist keep things the same or better? As you said, consumer surplus is the key here. The monopolist will capture almost all of the consumer surplus. This is a worse situation for customers than with competition. With competition this isn’t likely.

Mint Mobile is a service that offers cheap phone plans but doesn't have their own telecommunications stack.

It is just enabling a lower tier of customer to operate on the same stack as everyone else.

This is vertical integration, not horizontal integration.

The level of monopolization remains the same.

And even with a monopoly, some of the benefit of simple convenience could come into play when there is acquisitions.

Not having to go to a separate store and maintain separate accounts for different things.

Having a cable company that sucks and a phone company that sucks is not good. If they merged and the service remained the same then now you just have two bundled services that both suck.

Yet, having a bundled plan would potentially be more convenient.

T-Mobile offers streaming services, home internet, and other things that Mint doesn't.

Yep I remember all the great deals on phones and phone service you could get back when Bell was the only option. Good times. /s

Another problem with monopolies is that they atrophy so much that they can fail to even maximize their own profit.

And I didn't say you would get a great deal from a rational monopolist. I said that you would get tiered services that keep consumer surplus as low as possible.

But T-Mobile is not a monopoly.

Have you ever dealt with companies with near monopolies? Are you seriously with a straight face suggesting they tend to act this way?

They never do because the WHOLE point of becoming a monopoly or near monopoly is so that the customer no longer dictates the terms of their relationship with the company. The company does. It is about a power shift and simply put power being taken from the customer is never good for the customer.

Related if you can afford it, NextDNS[1] on my mobile device has been a godsend for blocking ads. Literally amazing how much speed it saves when sites aren't loading a bunch of ads / tracking libraries. I use it on my router and mobile devices and it's made a huge difference.

Re: competition being removed, that really sucks. I'm a Google Fi customer which has similar pricing, only downside is that if I switch to an iPhone, the service pretty much becomes useless as you lose access to WiFi calling and hotspots, things that work seamlessly on my Pixel :/

Edit: Apparently Google Fi now supports WiFi calling and mobile hotspots on iPhone as of iOS 13 Hmmmmm, maybe I can switch with no problems now.

[1] https://nextdns.io

I've also had success using dns.adguard.net as the private DNS on my phone. Doesn't cost anything but I believe the paid version of this and similar services allow for customization and statistics.

In applications/browsers without an adblocker, ads just show up as broken or don't bother loading. In Firefox/Mull/etc with uBlock Origin, it's redundant as those block and hide.

I used to use AdAway (maintains a system-wide blacklist added to your hosts file) but when I got my current phone I didn't bother unlocking superuser access and I believe the non-root version uses a VPN type solution. The custom DNS works almost as well.

Downside is that Adguard has a record of your DNS lookups, but normally your ISP or whoever has that so I consider it a wash. YMMV.

I use 1.1.1.1 for DNS on my iPhone just because of Cloudflare's speed in my desktop tests, DNS over HTTPS, and reliability. I do love AdGuard, and use the app on my iPhone. I've compared AdGuard MV3 vs uBlock Origin Lite MV3 in Edge, and since the beginning of it all till today, AdGuard is doing the better job.

The UBo team seems to want to find a way to punish users for MV3, removing features that AG MV3 has managed to implement, like adding custom filters. I don't need much of that, but I do need the ability.

The idea is to push uBlock fans (like myself) over to Firefox to use their full implementation. Not only is MV2's time limited in FF, but I used FF for 20 years straight. I'm not going back because there's enough web glitches with it that I don't want to anymore.

AdGuard seems to be doing a great job on mobile and desktop. Your comment just further backed up what I've been finding lately.

fyi, they recently implemented wifi calling on iphone, maybe late last year? And IIRC I’ve been using hotspot on Fi for at least a year?

I do find the "unlimited" plan claims annoying. Most operators make this false claim. I know for sure that Tello does something similar, and their fallback is a "2G" (not actually 2G, just throttled) throttled speed to about 64kb/s. This is effectively unusable, and while they might claim it is just "slower", in application, many requests will just timeout and cause errors at those speeds.

I think Mint and Boost throttle down to around 512kb/s, although not sure as I've never experienced, tested, or read about it myself.

Mint uses TMobiles network. The Mint alternative existed in the first place because it served TMobiles best interest.

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