AT&T wireless pricing & monopoly

If you care a little bit about broad coverage, including outside of your city, AT&T and Verizon are pretty much the only cell phone providers where I live. I travel a bit and, until recently, Verizon CDMA phones were a "no go" (few countries in the world use compatible technology - this is changing with Verizon LTE phones). Basically, as a customer in capitalist America, I can choose between 1 maybe 2 providers. Weird, I though capitalism was about ferocious competition.

Let's look at AT&T's pricing policy. It's interestingly very close to Verizon's and both go in the same general direction: offer "more" (data usage, number of text messages, minutes of call...) for higher prices.

• Until 2011, you could get 200 text messages for $5. Now you must either pay 20c per message or buy a $20 unlimited texting plan. Great if you are indeed sending/receiving 1000s of messages per month, but really the cost of 200 messages only has increased from $5 to $20. To put things in perspective, text messages cost "nothing" to AT&T - way below than 20c per message: it's a cash cow.
• The new "mobile share" plans push the price bar higher for basic users. Old family plans are still around but for how long? The cheapest "mobile share" plan (1GB) with 2 smart phones is $130. You can get 70+20+20 = $110 with no "unlimited" texting. True you get less data (300MB + 300MB), no unlimited minutes (700 minutes)... but you can pay less just for what you need and you can add smart phone lines at $30 with an extra 300MB of data (instead of $45 for mobile share).

Basically options to control cost for customers are being pushed to the backstage and eventually eliminated.

I'm not complaining about AT&T: like all businesses it wants to get more $ from each of its customers and is "encouraging" them to spend more for features they may not necessarily need.

... But I can only point that in a truly competitive market, it would be very hard for a service provider to push that kind of policy without at some point being bitten by a competitor. This doesn't happen here: Verizon price points follow the same upward trajectory.

[Note: they are free alternatives to text messages (google talk...)!]