The latest deals offered by mobile-phone provider Sprint fall far short of the "massive price war" once promised by the company's owners at SoftBank, raising a question: Why do U.S. consumers still pay so much money for such bad mobile data service?
Sprint is offering 10 wireless lines sharing 20 gigabytes of data for $100 a month to people who switch to its service. That's better than T-Mobile's four lines with 10 gigabytes for the same price, and even compares well with what I can get at home in Berlin, where a single user can get 1.5 gigabytes of data from Vodafone for $20 a month or 1 gigabyte from Telefonica for $6 (granted, without the hassle of setting up a traffic-sharing commune).