Inability to Change
appicurious.com
appicurious.com
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.
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...
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.
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.
The text charges are more of a historical addiction. Outside the US, voice charges were historically much higher (because they were priced to compete with the higher land line rates). So users flocked to SMS as a way to communicate more cheaply. In the US, voice charges on cell networks were comparatively cheap. Text was an "extra" that could be sold at a huge markup. And that revenue is hard to give up.
Cheers
I have some history in the telco world and while at a gig with one particular legacy carrier, noticed that when this topic came up in strategy sessions, there was zero sense of urgency. None. What. So. Ever.
My suspicions are that the rivers-of-gold experience of first vast voice revenue (tied to big investments that could be written down over a number of years) and then messaging revenue (which was just money for jam with very low overheads) has permanently damaged their business culture.
There are a couple of ways out of the bind that they're unable to face:
1. Innovate out of their situation by offering some value add that can be priced at value level, and not at cost-plus. Your suggestion of micropayments is a good one, and could be enhanced by their potential local knowledge of their market and user behavior to do commercially driven location aware services like advertising, offers and all those other things. Benefit would be to keep existing business customers on-board. Chances? Zero to none. Innovation is a big word in the telecomms world, but it really is just a way to flush billions down the toilet with not much more than deployed hardware to show for it.
2. Try to use their oligopoly situation (like the DSL and cable biz did) to stifle any new entrants at a regulatory level. This won't work too well because their new competitors aren't having to do buildouts - they're bypassing the carrier-customer relationship entirely. Therefore they'll need to be blocked or starved of bandwidth by the carriers. Chances? In some markets, like the US, probably 50/50 at this point looking at how successful industrial lobbying is right now. Net neutrality is their bête noir, and they'll do whatever they can to destroy any institution that tries to introduce it, like the FCC.
3. Avoid this whole shenanigans with innovation and regulators and do what oligopolies do best: price fix so that their customers do the dirty business bandwidth starve the innovative services out of the market because they only have 30Mb per month on the basic plan and it's USD100 for another couple of hundred Mb. Chances? If all the national providers move in lockstep and avoid any successful anti-trust investigations, it's easy and cheap. They'll never recover messaging revenue, but they could avoid other revenue erosion.
My bet's on parallel attempts at strategy 2 and 3.
One metaquestion: is your blog really uncopyrighted? Pretty cool if so.
When I see my relative in France talking about their locked contracts, I cry with them.
This is exactly the kind of disruption big companies(wireless carriers) need to get a kick in the ... and realize some things need to change.