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United States broadband customers have long had the luxury of flat-rate broadband pricing.  One monthly fee got you unlimited bandwidth, sparing us from having to count megabits up and down.  But now,  broadband carriers are either implementing tiered pricing (such as BendBroadband) or considering it (Comcast and others) in response to bandwidth intensive usage models such as online video streaming and Bit Torrent.

On the wireless side, Americans also enjoy unlimited amounts of bandwidth on our mobile handsets.  Verizon Wireless was the first telco to implement a ceiling to their “unlimited” mobile broadband EV-DO service when they capped bandwidth at 5GB/month.  However, for mobile handsets handset such as Nokia, Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices, major US wireless companies are still offering a mobile data plan with unlimited bandwidth up and down.

While reading this article about Qik (covered before), a warning light flashed in my head.  Will bandwidth intensive mobile applications such as Qik and others force mobile telcos such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint/Nextel, and T-Mobile to institute a mobile data bandwidth cap and tiered mobile data plan prices?

You see, Qik is an application that allows you to stream live video to the web, producing large volumes of data for mobile telcos to handle.  I’m sure that additional bandwidth-intensive applications are on the way, especially with more and more mobile handsets coming out with advanced hardware features.

My guess is that yes - unlimited mobile data will be a thing of the past within 5 years.  The mobile carriers have already shown with SMS that they’ll exploit every angle to improve their profit margins.  Rightfully so because they are a corporation, which exists mainly to create wealth for shareholders.

Enjoy your unlimited mobile data while you still can.

The cost of sending and receiving SMS, also called text messages, is getting obsurd.  As Marguerite Reardon of Cnet points out: since 2005, the cost of SMS has doubled on all four major US telcos from 10 cents to 20 cents per message.

Why are the mobile phone service providers charging this much to send 160 characters of information?  Simple answer - because people are paying it.  So before you go griping about the big corporations and their practices, complain to your telco and refuse to send SMS messages.  This will be the only way we can get through to the Big 4 (Sprint, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, and AT&T).

Sure text messaging is convenient and very popular in some circles (people under 25), but what is it going for us to say “enough is enough”.  Rather than use SMS, I suggest you look at mobile IM options.

Research in Motion announced today a CDMA BlackBerry Pearl, one year after launching the device on the T-Mobile network. This great device comes with EV-DO for ultra-fast data access, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, built in GPS, A2DP for stereo Bluethooth, and interface and browser improvements.

I definitely want one of these devices. I think it’s a great melding of candybar size phone with the features of a smartphone.