said by tschmidt:The goal is to turn the population into renters with no property rights so companies are able to collect rent.
T-mobile seems to be bucking the trend, going the opposite way. Their plans of not subsidizing phones, allowing you to BYOD, and an arguably leading pre-paid plan among the big 4 providers to me shows that they really don't care specifically about the "renting the hardware" market while they first rather provide the service. If you want to get the hardware from them, then they are happy to do that as well.