They were not expensive to operate, they were only expensive for consumers
But the cost to Bell and British Telecom was not £2 per minute, or £1 per minute, or even 1p per minute, it was nothing at all. Their costs were not for the call, but for the infrastructure over which the call was delivered, a transatlantic cable. If there was one call for ten minutes, once a week essentially at random, that cable must still exist, but if there are 10 thousand call minutes per week, a thousand times more, it's the same cable.
So the big telcos all just picked a number and understood it as basically free income. If everybody agrees this call costs £2 then it costs £2 right, and those 10 thousand call minutes generate a Million pound annual income.
It's maybe easier for Americans to understand if you tell them that outside the US the local telephone calls cost money back then. Why were your calls free? Because why not, the decision to charge for the calls is arbitrary, the calls don't actually cost anything, but you will need to charge somehow to recoup the maintenance costs. In the US the long distance calls were more expensive to make up for this for a time, today it's all absorbed in a monthly access fee on most plans.
Its successor TAT-8 carried ten times as many calls a few years later, industry professionals opined that there was likely no demand for so many transatlantic calls and so it would never be full. Less than two years later TAT-8 capacity maxed out and TAT-9 was already being planned.
Today lots of people have home Internet service significantly faster than all three of these transatlantic cables put together.
In the US, ATT was just barely deregulated by then so the prices were not just 'out of thin air'.
for GSM? not really, Yes SMS was sent at a lower priority than voice, so if there is a lot of voice traffic, SMSs wouldn't be delivered as quickly.
But, to my original point, do you think the towers were free?
Thats the point, it took a shittone of captial to make the network.
Did the mobile networks make a lot of cash? also yes. But they also took on huge amounts of debt and went bust.
Prices will probably also drop if anyone ever works out how to feasibly compete with NVIDIA. Not an expert here, but I expect they're worried about competition regulators, who will be watching them very closely.
No, they won't. Because "AI assistants" are mostly wrapped around a very limited number of third-party providers.
And those providers are hemorrhaging money like crazy, and will raise the prices, limit available resources and cut off external access — all at the same time. Some of it is already happening.
What's the reasoning behind this? They are already doing the efficient "economies of scale" thing and they are already at full capacity (hence rate limiting).
The only way forward for this AI providers is to raise prices, not lower them.