Reason? International texts
My girlfriend is Italian. She texts her friends and family in Italy a lot - mostly because the call costs to/from a mobile are prohibitively stupid.
No contract that's a sensible price includes decent amounts of texting/calling to/from Europe to make it worth the while compared to some pre-pay international card (even with the hassle). However, even texting from them, it adds up quickly as the texts are never cheap especially if you use more than whatever arbitrary amount they like to limit you to. Don't even get me started on her having to have two mobiles, one for Italy, one for the UK, because using the UK mobile in Italy or vice versa is so stupendously expensive.
Honestly, we pay £25 a month for the basic phone, contract and included calls (which cover everything UK-wide that we do). She then pays £10 or more a month on top just for international calling / texting to Europe and goes through a rigmarole every time to top it up. And some months it can cost her even more than that. Bear in mind that she saves anything mundane for the daily Skype conversations she has with her parents / friends of an evening (which we don't pay for at all).
Lately, she's started using WhatsApp Messenger from her phone. Sure, she could use Skype but it's data-heavy and limited by the telecoms companies so it can be unusable. Load all her friends on Whatsapp, pay some stupidly minimal one-off price each, done. It looks like a text, works like a text, basically is a text, and basically costs nothing per text.
Text pricing is the biggest rip-off in the history of the world. It costs literally nothing for them to do - hell, why not just convert it to some Internet packet at the cell towers directly and save all the back-end bandwidth? You're literally sending a handful of bytes and charging pence every time, while other people are using every megabyte (HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF TIMES MORE DATA!) they are allowed to browse Facebook. It costs no more to send internationally than anywhere else (and if it does, then maybe the EU should be looking into that, given the common market, etc). But we all know that the pence add up very quickly.
It used to be that you'd use text because a phone call would cost more and you could do it quicker with a text message. That's not been true for years. I basically stick to included text plans and not a penny more because it's such a rip-off. And now my girlfriend has got sick of trying to find a reasonable contract and does anything she can to stop giving the telcos more money. That strategy of gouging their most keen customers really works for them.
When I can enable 3G, send hundreds of thousands of times more bytes, and it cost nothing above and beyond what I'm already paying, why should I pay for texts? It's cheaper to go on the Internet, download a webpage, submit your text on the HTTP form, have that website send your text to the number you specify and it arrive back down to the phone you sent it to, than it is to just text it direct.
I have no sympathy. And I'll have no sympathy until they price things properly, support people's usage of their phones (i.e. stop blocking Skype or give me a reason not to use it!), and offer EU-based packages that aren't so ludicrously expensive that people are afraid to use their phones abroad (even if the telco company they use exists both at home and in the country they are going to, and probably sends all the data to their main datacenter anyway).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
