I think that your post would have made a lot of sense in, say, 2009 – but not really keeping up with the times.
Most of the major cell providers have been moving away from the practices you describe over the past several years— they are selling plans with unlimited services, no overage or roaming charges, and the lock-in contracts have been replaced with the option to finance the phones. The whole point of the 2-year contracts were that the companies were giving away the phones for free or deeply discounted – so now they’ve gone to the more transparent practice of reducing the monthly cost for data and phone service – and instead letting the people who can’t afford a brand new $800 phone opt into a financing agreement to pay $38 a month for 2 years, on top of the service. (But no one has to buy the phone )
With the advent of smart phones a lot of users want lots of data – unlimited these days – so they can use their phones to watch HD videos — and prepaid by definition come with a data cap. You’ve paid for X and when X runs out, the phone doesn’t work until you pay again – or if not (such as if you have a credit card linked to the phone plan) -then you end up with the same surprise extra charges when the system automatically charged for the excess use.
At this point I don’t see any advantage to pre-paid unless I wanted a burner phone for some reason – such as an extra phone I could give to a little kid who didn’t ordinarily have a phone for short term use - or something to give to a guest who was visiting from out of the country. Whatever unexpected tacked on charges that could come with postpaid are a thing of the past.
I’d just also mention that I make a point of paying my cellphone bill by credit card and time it for the next billing cycle of the credit card – so the bill I paid by a charge on February 5 for January usage will not come due for me to actually pay dollars for until around March 25th. Way back when there was this thing called “interest” that was paid on bank accounts, which meant that it was useful to leave cash sitting around for an extra couple of months. I hear that’s coming back in fashion. So at least for those of us with steady incomes and well-established credit, the pay-later system works just fine.
One more thing-- over the years there have been many times when I have been able to call up my provider and get them to waive some of those extra charges for various reasons – one advantage of post-paid is the ability to dispute a bill. I suppose with prepaid those charges woudn’t have been incurred in the first place… but sometimes its nice to have my cake and eat it too.
So the answer to your question is that post-paid works very well for a lot of us and if your data about market share is correct, it sounds about right.