Don't Shoot The iMessager: Why Cell Phone Networks May Soon Have To Shrink Your Bill

Apple is due to launch its iOS 5 update to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch's systems, bringing iMessage with it. Because of this, and other new tech, how your cell phone provider charges you for your service may be close to radically changing--powered not by internal company decisions, but by smartphone advances.

If consumers leap to using nearly free texting alternatives, revenue is lost, because although an iMessage-style "SMS" does eat into a customer's data plan bandwidth, the burden is so small they'd have to be a world-record texter to notice significant munching of their data plan. In other words, it's much harder to monetize. And that's not all that's happening.