What happened to the "good old days" of the pre-iPhone era? I mean, even the older option where it was STANDARD for effectively all carriers to offer unlimited voice+text+roaming to/from anywhere in the USA for $100 a month?
Well, given the above story on $100/month, and those of us that know that it USED to be $40-70/month back just a few years before THEN, that it's pretty clear: we more or less still have cartel behavior in the wireless business. It's an outright scam: network load costs aren't all that great for most users, yet they still get fleeced. Potentially, it might be understandable for data plans, as the existing networks were (initially) unprepared for the flood of freshly-minted smartphone (read: iPhone/Android) users that initiated in 2007.
However, those of us who don't need data (and only voice and text) have seen prices skyrocket, in spite of the cheap cost of servicing such users. The fact that any companies charge for text at ALL is a scam: any and all text messages are crammed into the network's overhead "heartbeat" packets that would be sent and received at the same rate regardless of whether the user is texting or not. (this is why a text message can take a couple seconds to send)
It disgusts me how much of a set of dinosaurs today's carriers are, and how much they fight to try and maintain their lavish profits for what is becoming progressively less-impressive service.