The link you sent shows a heavy bias towards age being the major contributor of people not having smartphones. According to it, 96% of age 18-49 have smartphones. Knowing the income distribution of the US, it's not possible that there's a 2000 bps gap caused purely by income disparity given that 96% number. What's more likely is that for older low income people the smartphone adoption rate is very low, but for younger generations it's very high (even though they're poor). That lines up with what I anecdotally see - even homeless people have smartphones.
> There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan
$15/mo plans with multiple gigabytes of LTE + unlimited 3G exist (Mint Mobile). There's an entire class of MVNO dedicated to the low cost market. I myself pay $25/mo for 10GB of LTE through AT&T. And the reason the price isn't lower is because the carriers (who are an oligopoly - that's why they pay massive dividends) lease time on the towers to the MVNOs and determine the price at which the time is leased.
> Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor.
In the long run, they are. Smartphones coming into existence did more for the vast majority of poor than any amount of government subsidy of telecom bills did. (If you didn't know, the FCC subsidizes low income Americans' wireless bills!) The reason internet prices haven't been a race to the bottom yet like smartphones is precisely _because_ there is an oligopoly and a non-functioning market.
If you compare markets where Google Fiber entered to ones where they didn't, the impact of a competitor actually trying to win market share and compete is obvious.
Can you give me an example of a market with substantial competition that has ignored the 10th percentile of customers?
> There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan
$15/mo plans with multiple gigabytes of LTE + unlimited 3G exist (Mint Mobile). There's an entire class of MVNO dedicated to the low cost market. I myself pay $25/mo for 10GB of LTE through AT&T. And the reason the price isn't lower is because the carriers (who are an oligopoly - that's why they pay massive dividends) lease time on the towers to the MVNOs and determine the price at which the time is leased.
> Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor.
In the long run, they are. Smartphones coming into existence did more for the vast majority of poor than any amount of government subsidy of telecom bills did. (If you didn't know, the FCC subsidizes low income Americans' wireless bills!) The reason internet prices haven't been a race to the bottom yet like smartphones is precisely _because_ there is an oligopoly and a non-functioning market.
If you compare markets where Google Fiber entered to ones where they didn't, the impact of a competitor actually trying to win market share and compete is obvious.
Can you give me an example of a market with substantial competition that has ignored the 10th percentile of customers?