The fundamental problem with most commercial infrastructure providers (which is pretty much all wired and wireless ISP) is that competition can never be perfect because of the laws of physics.<p>There is only so much room to put cables in the ground, or wireless spectrum to use. Thus, the governemnt auctions these roles off (often at far far below their actual worth), and companies use their physical monopoly to extract maximal profit with as minimal infrastructure as possible.<p>The obvious solution is pro-consumer regulation. Eliminate long term contracts and make unlocking of phones mandatory after contract expiration. Force all carriers to have common carrier status, so the physical infrastructure is a dumb pipe. This list could go on and on...<p>The problem with this is that anyone in the industry will lobby against this and they already have the political will against any change, as they're making a ton of profit via their monopoly status.
Why change when you are hauling in billions of dollars per year, and there's nowhere to go but down? The mobile carriers are going to extract as many dollars as possible while they still can.<p>The fundamental problem is lack of competition. When there are only a small number of providers, none of them have an incentive to slash the price of texts to a more reasonable level.
I would love to hear the HN community thoughts on my article. My new blog is a work in progress and I am always open to suggestions how to make it better.<p>Cheers
I am not unhappy with my carrier, China Unicom. I have a good 3G for 15$/month, no contracts. I go to the nearest cigarette seller and buy cards to pay them, and it stops when i stop paying, that's all.<p>When I see my relative in France talking about their locked contracts, I cry with them.
There's still room for disruption in the U.S. wireless space. Check out our latest project, <a href="http://ting.com" rel="nofollow">http://ting.com</a>, which went into private beta last week. Hopefully its a boat-rocker.