Haha I'm not gonna spend $60/month on data for my phone. You can buy a new phone three times a year for that. But you've got a point, a lot of people do.

Cheap, fast, coverage. Pick two.

Easy - cheap and fast. I've never had coverage issues within 50 miles of a major metro area (where I spend 99.999% of my time). Paying 30% more to have coverage on every remote stretch of a roadtrip (when I'm typically trying to disconnect and/or listening to downloaded music/audiobooks) has never been remotely tempting.

Besides, I mainly mentioned Virgin as an example of where I expect all the carriers, the coverage leaders included, to go very shortly.

This is highly localized to India, but Reliance Jio offers all three. Widest LTE coverage, fastest and most modern data infrastructure, cheapest plans. They're literally killing incumbents like Vodafone and Idea.

To give an idea about the prices, I pay ₹349 ($5.46) for unlimited voice plus 1GB high speed data per day. Oh and this is not a monthly plan, it's for 3 months!

Yeah, I'm extremely jealous of the cellular plans I've heard of from other countries. The state of US carriers is a joke.