I don't think carriers are running out of bandwidth yet. A better analogy would be that you are a farmer on an island that can grow a fixed amount of beans. Demand for beans has historically been low, but there were business customers willing to pay a lot for beans, so you grow them. They wanted to be able to get beans anywhere, and there is an extremely short shelf life, so you grow beans everywhere. This leaves you with a surplus of beans, so you want to find ways to get rid of them. In a free market, this would lead to a very low price for beans, but since you are in an oligopoly and have secret meetings with the other bean farmers on the island, you decide that you should push everyone to pay $30/month for "unlimited" bean subscriptions to feed the growing droid population on the island. But the supply of beans isn't really unlimited. When demand is low enough the supply is virtually unlimited, but as demand increases, the supply does become limited and you can't easily grow more beans. Instead of capping everyone's bean use, or charging per bean, you just do things to try to limit beans, such as not allowing droids to eat too many beans at once. This works for now, but as the droid population continues to grow, you will run out of beans, or at least fertilizer and water, and you will have to start imposing caps. To keep up with future demand, you are working on engineering "4G" beans that provide more energy. There are some initial costs to start growing them (buying seeds, changing equipment), but once you are growing them, they don't really cost you much more than 3G beans. Yet when you start to roll out 4G beans, you charge people more for them (and still sell "unlimited" amounts).
If you do try to cap bean use, you want to set a high cap to compete with the other farmers that have "unlimited" bean plans. You choose 5 gigaBeans per month, which is more than most people will reasonable use, but hopefully enough to keep extreme users from depleting your bean supply. You know that if everyone takes 5 GB per month, you won't have enough beans, and you are afraid of what might happen when you look at the trend growth of the droid population. Maybe you will change your pricing scheme to something with lower caps and a slightly lower price, but you will still end up making more money as bean users buying from other farmers who don't exceed your smaller caps switch to your farm. But this switching doesn't happen quickly because back in the early days of bean farming, the bean farmers all decided, in a secret meeting, to lock everyone into two year bean contracts.
I could go on, but you get the point. Cell phone carriers are not in a great position themselves, yet they still try to extract as much money from people as possible (and do a good job of it). I think the carrier industry's business model in the US has deep flaws that affect both the consumers and the carriers, but as long as the carriers are making money, this isn't likely to change soon.