Just throwing out some numbers I was looking at a little while ago, something to do with how much US cell phone companies are obviously colluding and riping off customers.
Cost of Cell phone tower = ~ $300,000
Number of simultaneous users per tower = ~ 2000
High for expected user tower usage= 15%
Tower can then hold 16000 subscribers
Tower operating costs $30,000/year
average costs collected from subscribers a tower can hold= $9.6 million or $9,600,000 in revenue
or even if tower only has as many subscribers as max users $1.2 million in revenue
Case of Verizon
Revenue from wireless ~11.1 BILLION
among ~80 MILLION customers
total company operating costs 3.4 billion (out of 94 in revenue)
enough to buy 19,000 new towers a year after subtracting operating costs and overhead
area covered by a tower at minimum expected range (2 mi ) is enough to cover 3% of the US a year whereas at the expected distances of rural areas, it is enough to cover the entire nation with signal in a year.
These numbers may be rough, and maybe there are some errors, but add in the fact that other countries pay 1/5 what we do for cell service, something sure smells fishy.
