In germany I can get a S4 mini for £100 cheaper than uk.
S3 LTE £150 cheaper.
£36 a month may be the average I take your word for it, but thats a LOT of cash to spend on a phone service. I pay O2 under £14 for 800 mins + unlimited landline calls. I suspect your £17 option is a package that is barely useable with minimum minutes and data usage.
Where is the £17 month option, I picked s4 mini on tesco mobile and the lowest is £23 month. which is the cheapest listed on this page.
http://shop.tescomobile.com/anytime-upgrade
£17 a month for 2 years is £408 for the phone, not cheap.
Yes people are buying 4G, but remember there is 10s of millions of people who dont have that spending power, some people cant even afford contracts at all and just have payg phones. Thats why I said the true barrier is the cost of the phone, eventually £100 phones will have 4G and when they do is when we start seeing mainstream adoption of 4G.
I have noticed lately tho my mobile signal is weak in my area, and some googling shows news stories about mobile networks supposedbly turning down 3g/2g signals to get people to sign up to 4g.
But I dont care about 4G adoption, not sure why we debating it either on a STM thread
The main thing is 4G availability is increasing and competition is increasing which is a good thing, I think thats more the point you want to make.