Do You Have To Pay For 3G Network?

[trevpimp]

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I was at bestbuy. Employee told me if youre going to purchase an iPhone you must purchase the 3G access which is an extra $30. But I have wi-fi at my house.

You really have to buy 3g even if you have Wi-Fi at home?

If yes do you know why.

 

[daflake]

You have to pay for the data plan. This allows your phone to surf the net when you are not on WiFi...

 

[question fear]

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I was at bestbuy. Employee told me if youre going to purchase an iPhone you must purchase the 3G access which is an extra $30. But I have wi-fi at my house.

You really have to buy 3g even if you have Wi-Fi at home?

If yes do you know why.

Yes you need a data plan.

Because AT&T wants a nice, high, steady stream of income from each user, and forcing you into a data plan even when you aren't drawing on the network is a nice annuity for them.

 

[dukebound85]

it is silly how they make you buy the data plan

 

[aristobrat]

If yes do you know why.

Most of the reason is for the carrier to recoup part of the money they use to discount the phone to make it affordable for you.

AT&T sells the iPhone to you for $199, but they buy it from Apple for a lot more -- regular retail is $599. So even if you never use their data network, they lost a lot of money when they sold you the device for $199.

Verizon requires a data plan when you buy a smart phone, and T-Mobile just started requiring data plans for smart phones too.

 

[trevpimp]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11a Safari/525.20)

If yes do you know why.

Most of the reason is for the carrier to recoup part of the money they use to discount the phone to make it affordable for you.

AT&T sells the iPhone to you for $199, but they buy it from Apple for a lot more -- regular retail is $599. So even if you never use their data network, they lost a lot of money when they sold you the device for $199.

Verizon requires a data plan when you buy a smart phone, and T-Mobile just started requiring data plans for smart phones too.

So does this mean for every smart phone you're required to pay for a data plan?