Showing posts with label ETF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ETF. Show all posts

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Nobody Likes ETFs, But Nobody Wants to Pay Full Retail, Either

Consumers don't like early termination fees. But neither do they like paying full price. A new Apple iPhone 4 with 32 GBytes of memory can be purchased now for $299 with a two-year contract, or at full retail for $699, without a contract.

Which option do you suspect most people will choose? If you want to know why the hated ETFs exist, it is the subsidy.

AT&T’s ETF on a smartphone like the iPhone is $325, up from $175 in May. Why? Some will carrier greed. But under the old pricing rules, a consumer could buy a phone for $99 on contract, instead of $600. Then the consumer could break the contract, pay the $175 fee, getting the device, without a contract commitment, for $274.

The customer then could sell the device on eBay or simply sign up for service with no contract.

Nobody likes contracts or ETFs. But nobody wants to pay full retail, either.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Verizon Offers new FiOS Customers "No Contract: Service

Verizon Communications now will allow customers to sign up for its FiOS television and Internet services on a month-to-month basis at the same price as long-term contracts and without early termination fees. Though Verizon might have preferred the revenue stability contracts tend to provide, consumers hate them, especially the early termination fees.

And though many observers do not believe there is sufficient competition in the fixed broadband access market, the Verizon move seems clearly a result of marketing by its cable competitors blasting the Verizon requirements and touting the ability cable TV customers have to buy without contracts or early termination fees.

Verizon in January 2010 raised the early termination fees for FiOS customers to $360 from $179. To be sure, Verizon's economic rationale was the cost to activate a location. But that's a business issue Verizon has to deal with, as all providers incur additional expense to activate a customer.

But market pressure seems to have had effect. Effective immediately, all new Verizon FiOS customers can opt to pay for a bundle on a month-to-month basis, at the same prices charged to customers purchasing a term contract, and receive price protection for one year without an early-termination fee.

New FiOS consumers who order a Verizon bundle as part of a two-year contract can take advantage of the "Worry-Free Guarantee," allowing them to cancel their service within 30 days of the date of activation, with no termination fee.

The month-to-month option and "Worry-Free Guarantee" expand upon offers introduced earlier this year in Florida and Pennsylvania and that have met with very favorable customer response. It's hard to imagine those offers getting anything less than that reception, given the distaste consumers have for contracts and termination fees, despite the "goodies" that sometimes are part of the overall offers.

http://newscenter.verizon.com/press-releases/verizon/2010/new-verizon-fios-customers.html

"Tokens" are the New "FLOPS," "MIPS" or "Gbps"

Modern computing has some virtually-universal reference metrics. For Gemini 1.5 and other large language models, tokens are a basic measure...