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Facebook’s stock market debut finally came and went — but for all the breathless hype, shares ended right near their offering price.

On Thursday night, Facebook () set its final IPO price at $38 a share. When the stock began trading at 11:30 a.m. ET on Friday, the first trade came in at $42.05 per share — a gain of nearly 11%.

What is an IPO?

But the stock quickly reversed course, dropping down to hover right around the $38 IPO price for much of midday trading. Though shares rose modestly for short bursts of time throughout the day, they ended the session at $38.23.

While the price itself didn’t move much, trading was fast and intense. More than 80 million shares changed hands in the first 30 seconds of trading. By the end of the day, volume had spiked to around 567 million shares.

That easily set a new volume record for IPOs, smashing the previous record that automaker General Motors (, Fortune 500) set in 2010 with trading of around 450 million shares.

Facebook’s trading had been expected to start around 11 a.m. ET, but the opening was delayed.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell remotely, from the company’s headquarters in California. Facebook celebrated its public debut by gathering its staff Thursday night for an all-night hackathon.

At the $38 IPO price, Facebook is on track to raise $16 billion — making it the largest tech IPO in history. It’s the third largest U.S. IPO ever, trailing only the $19.7 billion raised by Visa (, Fortune 500) in March 2008 and the $18.1 billion raised by automaker GM in November 2010, according to rankings by Thomson Reuters.

Underwriters have the option to purchase an extra 63.2 million shares to cover any so-called over-allotments for excess demand. If that happens, Facebook will sell 484.4 million shares in total. That would bring the amount raised to $18.4 billion.

How much Facebook is worth: At $38 per share, Facebook’s market capitalization would be around $81 billion on IPO day.

Many Facebook employees and executives hold unexercised stock options. If all of those shares were exercised, Facebook’s outstanding share count would rise to around 2.8 billion — pushing the company’s total valuation closer to $107 billion.

Among all global companies, Facebook has the third-highest IPO-day valuation in history, according to data from DealLogic.

SecondMarket, an exchange on which people can buy and sell stock in private companies, posted data on Friday about Facebook’s private-trading history.

It wasn’t until 2010 that SecondMarket’s Facebook trades racked up significant volume, so Facebook’s trades before that tended to be one-off deals at a low per-share price. In April 2010, Facebook fetched an average price of $9.82 per share on a monthly average basis. One year later, the rate jumped to $31.46.

As of April 5, Facebook shares were trading for an average of $42.72 each — nearly $4 higher than the IPO price.

Who’s selling shares: Zuckerberg plans to sell 30.2 million shares in the IPO offering. That will net Zuckerberg about $1.1 billion.

But Zuckerberg won’t be hanging on to his cash. Facebook said he will use the "substantial majority" of the windfall to cover the massive tax bill he’ll be hit with, thanks to his plan to exercise a large stock-options grant that will increase his ownership stake in the company he founded.

After the offering, Zuckerberg will still hold 503.6 million shares, or about 31% of the company. That stake is worth $19.1 billion at the IPO price.

Venture capital firm Accel Partners, which is the largest shareholder outside of Zuckerberg, is selling 49 million shares in the offering. That’s about a quarter of its Facebook holdings.

– CNNMoney’s Chris Isidore and Maureen Farrell contributed reporting. 

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ST. LOUIS • Six, seven and, finally, eight times, Geoffrey Baer walked across the lobby of the Wainwright Building until the director got the camera shot he wanted for a future public broadcasting program.

“10 Buildings that Changed America,” scheduled to air early next year, will include the Wainwright, in downtown St. Louis, and nine other buildings. The buildings span 215 years of American architecture, from the Virginia State Capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson, to Frank Gehry’s steel-clad Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Baer, an affable longtime public broadcasting presence in Chicago, will host the program. WTTW, the public broadcasting station in Chicago, is producing it. Recording began in April. Baer, director Dan Protess and camerman Tim Boyd were in St. Louis last week to examine the Wainwright, the granddaddy of all skyscrapers.

Though not the first tall building with a structural steel frame, the Wainwright showed in 1891 that steel could allow even brick to appear to soar. Famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan designed for St. Louis financier Ellis Wainwright the nine-story office building of narrow red brick piers that wrap the vertical portions of the steel framework.

Baer said that Sullivan, through his design of “soaring verticality,” demonstrated with the Wainwright how a building could resemble a column with a base, a shaft and a capital.

“The Wainwright is the one that defined what skyscrapers should look like,” he said.

Inclusion of the Wainwright, a National Historic Landmark, was a no-brainer for the 19 architects and architectural historians who helped determine what buildings to squeeze into the one-hour PBS program, Baer said.

“I think Wainwright was never in doubt,” he said. “I think it was always on the list.”

Other buildings featured will include a 19th-century church, an early Ford assembly plant, the first enclosed shopping mall and a post-modernist house.

There were some eligibility rules: All the buildings had to be in different cities and no architect could have more than one building presented. For example, Eero Saarinen’s most famous work is the Arch but the program features his Dulles International Airport terminal near Washington.

Each of the 10 buildings will only get five minutes of air time. Baer and Protess, who double as the program’s writers (and whose wives are from St. Louis), will present the structures in the order built and describe their innovations in style and construction. Baer said the program is not meant as a “10-best” list but as an effort to show buildings that had a lasting influence on American architecture.

“It’s not a competition — it’s not a horse race,” he said.

Among Sullivan’s contributions to the Wainwright was a demonstration of how a steel frame freed architects to design office buildings to be more pleasant for their occupants business cards. He included large windows that improved ventilation and provided more natural light in a time of primitive electric lighting. (Advances by Elisha Otis and others produced safer and faster elevators, making the modern skyscraper a practical reality.)

Only one true skyscraper, the 38-story Seagram Building in New York, made the program’s cut. Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe’s design, completed in 1958, epitomizes the sleek international style that stripped away exterior ornamentation and emphasized the building’s structural elements.

The Seagram will appear in the second half of “10 Buildings.” Immediately after the Wainwright, viewers will see the Robie House, the Chicago residence designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who briefly worked for Sullivan.

That the Wainwright survives is a tribute to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which took an option on the building, and the state of Missouri, which bought it for renovation in 1981 as offices. The neighboring Title Guaranty building, designed by architecture firm Eames and Young and built in 1898, was demolished in 1983. Gateway One, the building that includes Peabody Energy’s headquarters, occupies the site now.

During a downpour last Monday, Protess directed Baer to walk repeatedly across the Wainwright’s lobby while Boyd changed camera angles. Protess eventually got his desired shot of Baer striding across the tile floor as Boyd tilted the camera to capture the host gazing up toward the skylight added in the 1980s renovation.

PBS viewers will not see that Baer had to avoid a large rainwater puddle that spread across the floor below — a skylight leak. Protess fretted that rain would disrupt the next day’s shooting schedule.

“Tomorrow morning, I want it to be beautiful,” he muttered.

It was.

THE BIG 10

Here is a list of the program’s buildings with location, designer and year completed.

1. Virginia State Capitol, Richmond, Thomas Jefferson, 1788

2. Trinity Church, Boston, H.H. Richardson, 1877

3. Wainwright Building, St. Louis, Louis Sullivan, 1891

4. Robie House, Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1910

5. Highland Park Ford Plant, Highland Park, Mich.; Albert Kahn, 1910

6. Southdale Center, Edina, Minn.; Victor Gruen, 1956

7. Seagram Building, New York, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, 1958

8. Dulles International Airport, Chantilly, Va.; Eero Saarinen, 1963

9. Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Penn., Robert Venturi, 1964

10. Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, Frank Gehry, 2003

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Oil dropped below $100 per barrel for the first time since February following a disappointing U.S. jobs report and warnings of a weakening world economy.

Benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude fell as low as $99.90 Friday before edging back to $100.21 per barrel in New York. Crude prices are down 2.3 percent for the day.

Oil prices have been falling since Wednesday as analysts and traders increasingly focus on the economy. The Labor Department said Friday that the economy added just 115,000 jobs in April _ far fewer than the pace of hiring earlier this year. Government data shows that U.S. oil consumption dropped 5.3 percent in the first quarter, and supplies have been growing for the past six weeks and hit a 22-year high in Cushing, Okla., where benchmark crude is delivered.

The European economy also is slowing down as eurozone governments continue to struggle with a mountain of debt.

“We’re fearful that the economy is slowing more than we originally thought,” PFGBest analyst Phil Flynn said.

Oil has crossed the $100 mark 21 times during the past year. It rose as high as $113.93 per barrel last April and fell as low as $75.67 per barrel on Oct. 4.

As demand falls in the West, OPEC has been delivering more oil to world markets in an effort to force prices even lower Online payday loans. And Western nations are planning talks with Iran over its nuclear program, easing fears of a protracted standoff in the Middle East. Concerns about Iran, which is believed to be building a weapon, helped push benchmark oil to its peak near $110 per barrel earlier this year.

The recent drop in oil has helped make retail gasoline cheaper in the U.S. Pump prices have declined by an average of 13 cents per gallon since peaking this year at $3.936 on April 6. The national average hit $3.802 per gallon on Friday, according to auto club AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service.

OPIS chief oil analyst Tom Kloza said gas prices will head lower for the rest of the year. Kloza expects the national average to drop as low as $3.50 per gallon before the Fourth of July.

In other futures trading, heating oil lost 5.12 cents to $3.0357 per gallon, wholesale gasoline lost 4.55 cents to $3.0045 per gallon, and natural gas lost 4.6 cents to $2.294 per 1,000 cubic feet. Brent crude, which is used to set the price of oil imported into the U.S., lost $1.98 to $114.10 per barrel.

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From oil fields to wind turbines to coal mines, size and scale rule the economics of energy.

But the nuclear industry is thinking small these days.

The latest evidence came last week when Ameren Missouri and Westinghouse Electric Co. announced plans to pursue a $452 million federal subsidy to advance development of small modular reactors that could be built alongside the utility’s much larger Callaway nuclear plant near Fulton, Mo.

While some utilities are still pursuing full-scale plants, there is a parallel push for smaller reactors that could be easier for utilities to finance and minimize sticker shock for regulators and consumers. But despite a lower total cost, there’s no evidence yet that tiny fission factories would be able to produce electricity at a competitive cost in an era of abundant, cheap natural gas.

“There just isn’t any proof that small reactors are going to be any more economic than larger ones,” said Peter Bradford, an adjunct law professor at Vermont Law School and a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member. “At this point, it’s all about hype and hope.”

The so-called small nuclear reactors promise the same benefits as larger ones: namely, an option for around-the-clock, low-carbon electric generation that could be a key in replacing aging coal plants.

For utilities considering nuclear technology, the smaller size means a smaller price. Even using the most generous cost estimates, a new nuclear plant the size of Ameren Missouri’s existing Callaway plant could rival or exceed the $7.5 billion market value of the utility’s entire parent company.

But the differences go beyond size. For one, the small reactors envisioned would be modular, able to be manufactured at a central factory, shipped by rail, ships or truck and assembled on site. That means a potentially larger market for vendors like Westinghouse.

“This (small) plant will appeal to a very broad market,” Kate Jackson, a Westinghouse senior vice president and chief technology officer said last week.

SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES

The pursuit of small reactors represents a new path to the oft-referenced nuclear renaissance.

It was only a few years ago that the industry focused strategy on certification of a few large reactor designs that would, in theory, eliminate the risk and uncertainty, cost overruns and construction delays that tainted the last nuclear plant boom.

While new reactors are going forward in Georgia and South Carolina, a full-tilt nuclear revival hit a wall for several reasons. Among them: the inability of utilities to finance projects that cost multiple billions of dollars.

In fact, more than half of the new reactors for which construction and operating licenses were sought have been deferred or cancelled, including Ameren Missouri’s proposed 1,600-megawatt Callaway 2 plant.

Andrew Klein, a nuclear engineering professor at Oregon State University, sees small reactors as part of a new strategy that could help utilities get over the hump by adding new capacity in small bites. They could then use revenue from the first small reactors to help finance subsequent units as more generating capacity is needed.

“It’s an entirely different business model,” he said.

The Obama administration, which is pushing for development of low-carbon energy technologies, sees potential, too. And the president wants the United States to take the lead in developing the industry.

Last month, Obama proposed $452 million to help speed up development of small modular reactors. The funding availability would come on top of $8 billion in loan guarantees for the Vogtle twin-reactor nuclear project in Georgia low fee payday loans.

The federal funding, which has yet to be appropriated by Congress, would support engineering, design certification and licensing of up to two plant designs that have the potential to be licensed and in commercial operation in a decade.

Westinghouse says it believes it has an advantage because the 225-megawatt reactor it’s developing is an offshoot of the company’s full-size AP1000 reactor that has already been certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“The path from here to the end is shorter for us than anyone else,” Jackson said. No other vendor has been through the new licensing process and has technology that’s already been licensed.”

PIECE OF THE PIE

At least two other groups have indicated they will seek a share of the federal grant. Both are eyeing the Department of Energy-owned Savannah River site in South Carolina, and are being backed by NuHub, an economic development initiative in South Carolina.

Holtec International Inc. on Tuesday said it intends to seek a share of the federal funding to speed up development of its 160-megawatt small modular reactor. Two weeks ago, NuScale Power, based in Corvalis, Ore., announced plans to seek funding to accelerate development of its 45-megawatt nuclear modules at Savannah River site.

Other nuclear industry players are pursuing modular designs. And at least one other utility has publicly expressed interest in small reactors.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has said it is looking at Babcock & Wilcox’s small reactor design for a project on a utility-owned site near the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

For all the hype, small reactors, are still at least a decade away. And that’s if design, licensing and commercial development go at the pace hoped for by the nuclear industry.

And even then, the potential for small reactors hinges on how they compete in the energy marketplace. More than concerns about nuclear safety in the wake of Fukushima disaster in Japan or the dilemma of where to dispose of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel, the technology’s future will be dictated by economics.

Jackson said Westinghouse aspires to make small reactors whose costs are equal to or less than full-size reactors.

For now, there’s no cost data for small reactors, and no firm evidence they will produce electricity at a lower price than larger plants.

“It’s too early to determine that,” Klein said. “We’re going to have to see some built.”

Ameren Corp. CEO Thomas Voss said at Tuesday’s shareholder meeting that if a new power plant was needed today, the lowest cost option would be a natural gas-fired power plant, not nuclear.

But gas prices have been especially volatile over the past several years. After spiking to more than $14 per thousand cubic feet in mid-2008, prices have plunged to less than $2 — the lowest level in about a decade.

That kind of volatility makes utilities hesitant to commit to natural gas-fueled power over the long haul, so Ameren continues to pursue nuclear development in Missouri to keep the option available in years to come, Voss said.

“We continue to believe nuclear power will to play a role in meeting Missouri’s energy needs,” he said.

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The cost of one of the country

Starbucks Corp., the world

European stocks faltered Wednesday after two days of gains but Asian markets jumped on speculation Japan might take new measures to spur its economy.

Stocks in Europe recovered their poise this week after a run of losses, with sentiment bolstered by solid U.S. corporate earnings, a surprise improvement in German investor sentiment and relatively well-received Spanish bond auctions. An upward revision to the International Monetary Fund’s global growth forecast also underpinned confidence.

How European markets close out the week will depend on Spain’s ten-year bond auction on Thursday. If it goes badly, investors will likely fret once again about the country’s ability to get a handle on its debts.

Spain has become the main source of concern in Europe’s debt crisis as investors worry about the government’s ability to push through a raft of austerity measures at a time when unemployment stands at a startling 23 percent and the economy is in recession.

The yield on the country’s ten-year bond on Monday spiked above 6 percent, not far off the 7 percent rate that eventually forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal into seeking financial help from their partners in the eurozone.

In the past two days, however, it has edged back down to more manageable levels. On Wednesday, it was down a further 0.15 of a percentage point at 5.74 percent.

Despite the drop in the yield, Spanish stocks continued to oscillate wildly. On Wednesday, the main IBEX index down 2.2 percent. Elsewhere in Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was 0.1 percent lower at 5,760 while Germany’s DAX fell 0.5 percent to 6,769. The CAC-40 in France was 1.1 percent lower at 3,254 poor credit personal loans.

The euro was also faring poorly in the risk-averse environment, trading 0.4 percent lower at $1.3074.

Wall Street was poised for modest losses at the open after registering one of its strongest gains in a month. How it will actually perform will depend on the next run of U.S. quarterly corporate earnings.

“With the U.S. earnings season in full flow, investors will be looking to see if earnings reports continue to beat expectations,” said Chris Beauchamp, market analyst at IG Index.

Earlier in Asia, sentiment was buoyed by indications that the Bank of Japan may do more to prop up the economy. Kyodo news agency reported that Deputy Governor Kiyohiko Nishimura’s suggested the central bank might take additional stimulus steps to tackle deflation.

That helped the Nikkei 225 index in Tokyo to soar 2.1 percent to 9,667.26 and the dollar to rise 0.5 percent to 81.46 yen.

Other stock markets were up too, including Hong Kong’s Hang Seng, which gained 1.1 percent to 20,780.73.

Mainland Chinese shares rose on hopes for financial reforms aimed at regulating private lending and creating new institutions to serve private borrowers better, analysts said. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index rose 2 percent to 2,380.85. The Shenzhen Composite Index gained 2.1 percent to 956.49.

Oil markets were subdued, with the benchmark New York rate down 6 cents at $104.14 a barrel.

____

Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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Hosni Mubarak’s former vice president said he decided to run for president to prevent Islamists from turning Egypt into a “religious state.”

Omar Suleiman, who was also Mubarak’s long-serving intelligence chief, said in an interview published Thursday that the Muslim Brotherhood’s fielding of a presidential candidate”horrified” Egyptians. The Islamic fundamentalist Brotherhood, which has emerged as Egypt’s most powerful political bloc after last year’s uprising, reversed an earlier decision not to field a candidate.

Suleiman told the weekly El-Fagr that the Brotherhood would control all state institutions if it wins the presidency and warned Egypt would be isolated internationally if that happened. The Brotherhood already controls just under half of parliament’s seats and is the single largest bloc. Together with other Islamists, they have a 70 percent majority in the chamber.

“It is my belief that those who demand that I run, like a majority of this nation’s citizens, are in a predicament and indeed the whole state is in a predicament, especially after the Brotherhood decided to field one of its leaders for the presidency after it pledged not to,” Suleiman, 75, said in the interview.

“That change struck horror in the souls of members of the Egyptians society. If the Brotherhood’s candidate wins the presidential election, Egypt will be turned into a religious state. All state institutions will be controlled by the Brotherhood.”

Suleiman’s comments came as the Islamist-dominated parliament debated a draft bill to strip top figures from the Mubarak regime of their political rights, including voting and running for office, for 10 years. If adopted, the law would disqualify Suleiman from running in the May 23-24 presidential election along with another candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, who was Mubarak’s last prime minister.

During Mubarak’s three-decade secular presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood was repressed with thousands of its members jailed payday loan companies.

Government representatives told the legislature on Thursday that the draft law violated the constitution, with the Justice Minister Mohammed Attiyah saying that no one should be stripped of their political rights without a court order.

Lawmakers countered that the nation remains in a “revolutionary state” that empowers the legislature to make such a law.

Others warned that a Suleiman presidency would mean the imprisonment of lawmakers and what one lawmaker described as the return of Israel’s influence in Egypt. Suleiman was a frequent visitor to Israel while Egypt maintained the Arab world’s first and longest standing peace treaty with the Jewish state.

“We are in a state of self-defense, we are defending Egypt and ourselves,” said independent Islamist lawmaker Mahmoud Khodeiri, one of the country’s top legal experts. “Omar Suleiman means Mubarak returns to the palace, and we all go to prison, and these are the lucky ones because others will be sent to the gallows.”

Mubarak is on trial for his life, charged with complicity in the killing of protesters in the uprising that toppled his regime. He was arrested in April last year, but has since been detained in hospital.

Other presidential candidates are also facing legal challenges, including the Brotherhood’s Khairat el-Shater. Some have challenged el-Shater’s candidacy on the grounds he served time in prison in connection to his political activity under Mubarak. He was pardoned by the military generals who succeeded Mubarak, but his detractors argue that more time must pass before he can run, according to the law.

The election of a president is the last stage of Egypt’s turbulent transition to democratic rule. The ruling generals who took over from Mubarak have promised to step down by July 1.

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A California “social lending” company will offer to return $461,000 to at least 175 Missouri investors under an agreement with Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan.

Lending Club, based in San Francisco, sells notes to individual investors, and uses the money to fund loans to individuals.  The loans back the notes.  The company seeks both borrowers and investors over the Internet.

Carnahan’s office said the company violated state law by failing to renew its state registration.  The law requires that most securities be registered before they can be sold to investors.

Lending Club registered its investments with the state in 2008, but let the registration lapse in 2010.

In a settlement with Carnahan, the company agreed to offer refunds, along with interest calculated at 8 percent annually, to investors who want them.  The firm also will pay $100,000 to the state’s Investor Education and Protection Fund and $5,000 to the Secretary of State’s office.

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The average cell phone customer now switches carriers as soon as his or her second two-year contract is up. That startling decline in loyalty is causing wireless companies to rethink the way they do business, according to a new study released Monday.

The average length of relationships between carriers and their under-contract customers fell to an all-time low of 48 months last year, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ found in the latest edition of its North American wireless industry survey. The comprehensive annual study includes data from all of the region’s major carriers.

The trend has building for a few years. What’s shocking is how quickly it accelerated. In 2010, the average customer-carrier relationship was 59 months — nearly a full year longer.

The most precipitous decline came among smaller cell phone companies, but large carriers like Verizon (, Fortune 500), AT&T (, Fortune 500) and Sprint (, Fortune 500) didn’t fare much better. Their average relationships with customers under contract lasted just 51 months.

"Competition is fierce, and pricing is a key element," said Pierre-Alain Sur, global communications industry leader at PwC. "That accelerates the jump from one carrier to another at the end of a contract period."

If customers are going to cut and run frequently, carriers will need to rethink their pricing models — particularly when it comes to expensive smartphones.

They’ve been encouraging customers to upgrade to smartphones because the devices bring in a new revenue stream. Most providers charge smartphone customers a premium for data usage, with plans averaging about $25 per month.

But what carriers didn’t anticipate were the incredible costs of keeping smartphone customers satisfied.

To get smartphones down to the magic price point of $200, carriers pay an average subsidy of $280 for each device — four times as much as the $70 average subsidy on a feature phone. Plus, smartphone customers are data hogs, requiring wireless companies to spend tens of billions of dollars each year improving their 3G network capacity and building out their 4G networks.

Meanwhile, average revenue per smartphone user is actually declining.

As data use grows, people are talking on their phones less easy payday loans. The average subscriber used just 638 voice minutes per month in 2011, down from 720 minutes in 2010. Customers are cutting back their voice plans, sending carriers’ average revenue per smartphone user down to $83 per month last year. That’s a drop from $86 in 2010 and $93 from 2009.

Less loyalty, growing subsidies, higher infrastructure costs and declining revenues have created an unsustainable dynamic for carriers. Profit margins are falling, and analysts expect the trend to get worse.

The iPhone is a nightmare for carriers

That means sweeping changes are coming.

"The business model is shifting, so they have to find a solution," Sur said.

Carriers have a few options.

First, they can increase prices on their phones. That’s already started to happen. Verizon and AT&T now offer a small selection of 4G phones for more than $200, with some as high as $300.

Another tactic is for them to pressure handset manufacturers to reduce device costs. Some may bargain, but the maker of the single most popular smartphone — Apple’s (, Fortune 500) iPhone — is no pushover.

Carriers could also try to find alternative sources of revenue. Right now, most are "dumb pipes," taking no revenue from the content that travels over their networks. If carriers could nab a slice of app store sales or video purchases, that might reverse their fortunes.

Finally, cell phone companies could switch to the "bring your own device" model that is popular overseas.

North American carriers have embraced the subsidy model for decades for two reasons: incompatible technologies presented steep obstacles to switching, and the subsidy model seemed to build customer loyalty.

Now, the whole industry is migrating to the 4G-LTE standard. With loyalty going out the window, carriers may drop subsidies and contracts altogether. Some may even try leasing handsets to customers.

Whichever option carriers choose, they will have to act fast, Sur thinks.

"They are going to have to determine what’s going to be the business model of the future," he said. "Carriers are at an inflection point." 

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