What a land of contradictions - on the one hand you have world's best companies like Apple and Google and on the other, these awful, badly run, penny wise pound foolish crapfests like AT&T.

I actually just got back from a month in the US, mostly in LA, staying around west hollywood. The phone coverage was just bullshit and I'm not exaggerating. I was constantly amazed how I'd be standing outside, on Sunset Blvd, with 1 bar of coverage or nothing at all - I'd have to be deep in a basement or in an obscure train tunnel to get that in Sydney. I'm amazed that anyone can use this tethering at all, I was lucky to be able to check my e-mail.

Just one of those crazy things ..

That really depends on the provider. Verizon seems to have pretty comprehensive coverage. There were some very public horror stories about their customer service a few years ago, though, which could turn out to be a downside.

It makes it easier to offer unlimited data if you can ban all the ways of using lots of bandwidth.

It might be worst in the USA. I don't know. But telecom companies all over the world seem to be in love with arbitrary restrictions on how you use their infrastructure.

All so that they can sell zillions of different plans for slightly different services, overcomplicating the market.

I really hope that some time in the future, an internet giant such as Google will step into the mobile internet space and simply regard all bandwidth as bandwidth. Without caring whether it's used for voice, short messages, long messages, video etc. It would make life so much simpler.

Huh. Mobile operators in Russia are trying to battle with VoIP. There were even news on lawsuits against Skype, and attempts to block its protocol (reportedly, sometimes succesfull, sometimes not).

Old link, but that's the best I could find for now: http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=393471