Well, here's the kicker. Over in Europe they have laws that say that the cellular providers can't bundle the phone with the plan (and in some cases they can't lock you into a contract either). The phone has to be sold separately from the provider as they're not allowed to sell phones. They can only set the requirements for their network, and then leave it up to the phone makers to abide by those requirements. That's why you have places like "car phone warehouse" in Britain.

And if it works so well over there, in fact it works 10x's better than our system here in the US, then why won't anybody try to force this to happen? Oh right, the cell companies are ripping people off, and they don't want to stop doing that. Plus they might actually be forced to compete! Oh wow, what a novel idea, and completely insane as far as the cellular providers are concerned.