There are a lot of good arguments for and against a telco's responsibility to the customer — as well as if this may or may not create a more competitive market.

What I fail to understand is why "data" has become the new golden ticket? In the past, when voice was all anyone cared about, we had a relatively competitive market. Features such as rollover minutes, family plans, and much more were offered.

For example, I have a 300 minute plan, but have maxed out at 5000 minutes now because I simply don't talk on the phone ( Rollover ). Maybe in the past, this was different and cost them more to send data across the wire — but now it is the same, voice data and "data" data moves across the same pipes as far as I know.

If the telco's had to be competitive when it was voice only and data was a luxury — and if data and voice are no different — why are the telco's having such a hard time with this?

If a plan has 300 minutes of talk time, how about I get 300MB of data time. If I don't use it all, then give me rollover data just like they do with voice.

These telco's basically have one competitor, that being the cable company. From what I understand, DSL had new subscriber counts that were so low I was shocked — something like a few thousand new accounts in total.

If they want to compete with cable, right now, they can't, but as soon as their speeds come in-line with cable, they have the potential to be your phone and internet. And unlike cable, who only sends out one bill, the telco gets to send out a bill to every single person. Now, everyone has their own Internet connection and is paying for it.

From what I understand, telco's are paying pennies per GB on this data from their upstream. Places like Netflix drop the data as close to their doorstep as possible, at which point, there is zero bandwidth cost for the ISP to shuffle those bits around to users. If I use all of my 500GB a month, that costs the cable co. well under a dollar in upstream fees. Yes, they have overheads with their equipment and business operations, but that can't possibly amount to the overage fee's they charge, let alone the fact it costs me $70.00 a month or more for a decent Internet connection.

They are going to over-charge themselves out of the game. As soon as wifi is ubiquitous and phones learn how to jump from one AP to another, things will get interesting. If I were closer, there is an ISP called Sonic that is bringing 1 Gbps symmetric Fiber to people's homes for a very reasonable fee, around $50.00 a month I believe.

Look at AT&T and SMS messages. Apple releases iMessage, making there no need for SMS for iPhone to iPhone users. But I still have to keep SMS running for those people who don't have an iPhone. Apple could solve a lot of this by opening up iMessage so others can use the protocol — which I believe Steve Jobs said was supposed to happen. If Android could talk to iPhone over iMessages, it would wake up the telco's very quick. The only remaining need would be the tweekers and their pay as you go phones, and banks, credit cards, and other pure txt services that send alerts. Though they could simply put in an iMessage gateway — but I have a feeling that would take years for them to implement.