http://www.billshrink.com/blog/mobil...costs-service/

The USA has literally the most expensive cellular plans in the entire world. I think it's time someone did something about that.

No, the US does NOT literally have the most expensive plans in the world. Come up here to Canada and you'll understand what "expensive phone plan" really means.

Here in Finland we have some of the cheapest phone plans in the entire world. Apologies for repeating myself from other threads but this is how it is done (I really really hope this happens in the US and Canada):

-Make phone locking illegal. All phones must work with any type of SIM card. This can be justified in law as locking is anti-competitive and serves no useful purpose to the consumer.

-All networks must accept user-authorised connections from any compatible device providing the device does no harm to the network infrastructure. If your device works with the network and you have a valid SIM card, there shouldn't be any roadblocks to stop you connecting.

In other words, make mobile phone service the same as cable-based broadband service. You pay a fee, you get your connection, no questions asked, no complex billing system. Dumb pipes, in other words.

Interestingly that last point about accepting connections from any device was what Google insisted upon as a precondition to that US frequency auction a while ago. If that was adopted on all frequencies in North America that would go a long way to solving the problems of competition, especially as phone hardware prices drop to insignificant levels (a truly basic mobile phone only costs about US$30 unlocked now).

Once you have competition the whole quality of service goes up, the prices go down, everyone uses the mobile internet a lot more and it then allows the entire mobile economy to grow much faster.

What's going on in the UK with 121% saturation?

1. Brits travel between competing carriers coverage areas often and must carry multiple phones in order to insure that they can be "reached."

2. It's popular in England to activate lines on your family plan for your unborn children.

3. Cell phone contracts are so hard to get out of that many have lines they no longer use but still pay for.

or;

4. How many working cell phones someone has clipped to their belt indicates their suitability for mating. It is part of a complex mating ritual in the UK and is sometimes accompanied but the seldom seen ritual "multiple ring tone" dance.

(citations needed )

I'm actively involved in lobbying for laws against locking and exclusives.

The laws for locking devices and prices are low because of them.

please explain...
Iknow I said saturation but the graph actually calls it % penetration, for market I presume.

Seeing as cellular service has a lot to do with the propagation distance of waves, I assume you could add a set of data to that and show that the less dense the population, the higher the nationwide average cost of cellular coverage. So as people per square mile goes down, average cell phone plan cost goes up. This is just a hypothesis, somebody with more time feel free to do the extrapolation

That link did not have average cost for either canad or australia, both of which are less population dense than US and which I expect would have higher costs

Seriously the US is a pretty expensive. I moved to Japan about 6 months ago and I was blown away with how cheap cell phones "can" be. I have Softbank, and basically if I just call other softbank users and don't use the internet I can get away with an equivalent of a $10 a month phone bill. Luckily all the people I know here have softbank. Now it is easy to rack up a bigger bill but if I were to get an unlimited data plan and upgrade my plan so it was cheaper to call people on other carriers then I am looking at about $50 a month. But even with the upgraded plan if I call people on other carriers it will cost me about 20 cents a minute. So you can see how it could get real expensive real fast. You just need to be aware of who you are calling and you can cheap it on the cheap side.

While that's true, 90% of Canadians live within 50 miles of the US border. We're very concentrated towards the south and sparce everywhere else.