In Canada they do that and keep the extra profits. Koodo is one of Telus’ flanker brands (for the illusion of competition) and even though they’ve increased phone and plan pricing a fair bit over the last couple of years they’ve gotten rid of the ability to directly call customer support.
The Canadian government has been promising us action in the mobile industry for ages, but year after year after year our prices go up and up and up.
A good starting point would be legislation that Israel enacted to get competitive markets as described by rvp-x:
> - Ban on SIM-locking of phones to one provider
> - Allowing users to change providers without losing their phone number
> - Ban on "exit penalties" for customers leaving a contract
> - Forcing existing infrastructure providers to share their infrastructure with virtual or not-yet-fully-deployed new providers
Another will be to bring down quality of service level. A couple of years back I was india and area where my mother lived had service down for like a week. That area must have a population of at least few 100Ks.
Third to have very little customer service staff. People here have legitimately said why the hell do I care about 1000s of customer service/call center staff. I want my service cheap. In countries like India they have done that. Social media call these companies evil but I think they are just trying to run cheap service.
Fourth is to spend much less on network equipments and field testing. Service is announced at much cheaper price point but backend systems are severely overloaded so one gets much more network/call drops.