In each of these programs there is an option to pay a bit more in order to switch your phone out after a year. But, you can also choose to just not do that and pay off your original purchase. In essence you would be rewarded by bringing your own device or by keeping your device longer. If you pay off that phone your bill goes down. That is excellent compared to the traditional contract system where even if you had technically paid off the original subsidy the monthly rate stayed the same. This is new for the American consumer. The prior system rewarded constantly upgrading and signing contracts - this one rewards a slower pace. Tim Cook alluded to this in Apple's last earnings report when he said sales were affected by new carrier upgrade policies.
This system is certainly a lot more fair than the old one in that you're not paying subsidy beyond the point where the phone is paid off. Whether or not the pricing for the actual service is another thing though. Especially with T-Mobile and Sprint the discount on the monthly bill isn't really that steep. In some cases they've subtracted $10 to then charge $27 for a high end phone.
The American consumer won't adopt this across the board so long as the price isn't making sense. Right now it takes too long to see a cost benefit to buying a phone full price. Current Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has publicly alluded to new pricing models that the carrier is trying in some markets that drops the starting Framily rate quite a bit lower for multiple lines of service. If those rate plans manage to actually only charge for the cost of the service and leave the device out of it I'll be a big fan.
