The title says it all, really: both T-Mobile and Sprint have announced they’ll begin prorating the early termination fees they charge customers who want out of their contracts before they expire, meaning the top four US operators now all have such policies. We’ve still got to wait for details, though, to make sure their prorating plans aren’t like Verizon’s — which is to say they’re not really prorated at all, just discounted by $5 each month.

The whole subsidy/ETF system is broken, really, and ready for a rebuild. Scrapping them completely would do away with a lot of the problems for both consumers and operators — but would jack up handset prices, making it a tradeoff most consumers probably wouldn’t be happy with. Anybody have any better ideas? Perhaps making the ETF inline with the actual subsidy for each user?