Sprint Next to Enter the Pan-Americas Mobile Plan Market?

Perhaps AT&T’s move into the Mexican mobile market, allowing AT&T customers to communicate across the United States and Mexico as though they were in one country--or with low rates--now has ignited a wider response across much of the U.S. mobile market.

First T-Mobile US responded with a similar plan, but added Canada to the unified coverage area.

Now Sprint might up the ante again, according to a post on a Sprint-focused website, and a post authored by a Sprint employee.

The rumored new Sprint no-cost roaming plan includes unlimited calling and messaging, plus use of 1 gigabyte of mobile data across Canada, Mexico and 12 South American countries, might be launched this week.

This plan includes unlimited free calling to Canada and Mexico from the United States and then calling to South American countries for five to 20 cents a minute.

For additional data usage beyond the free 1GB, each additional gigabyte costs $30, billed at $0.00002861/KB.

How about if you're in places other than Canada, Mexico or the listed Latin American countries?

The same data rate applies of $30/GB for high speed data, texting is free and calls are 20 cents per minute.

Countries covered initially include:

• Argentina
• Brazil
• Chile
• Columbia
• Costa Rica
• Dominican Republic
• El Salvador
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• Nicaragua
• Panama
• Paraguay

Aside from the observation that no particular innovation by any one leading service provider will go unchallenged for long, most recent innovations involved giving users “more for less.”

That is what we have come to expect in the competitive telecom industry. At a high level, the trend to offer “more for less” also illustrates the long-term tendency of any digital market to drift towards marginal cost pricing.

Most people instinctively would understand or believe that end user prices for any digital product will trend, now or over time, towards the marginal cost of producing the next unit.

Most in the industry will acknowledge that the incremental cost of the next unit of any digital product is very close to zero.

That suggests the long term tendency will be for digital product prices to push relentlessly towards a cost very close to zero. That does not mean literally “zero,” but prices so low the cost is not a barrier to consumption or use.