Back in year 1999 (yup, that's full 13 years ago) I was using my desktop Linux (Red Hat Linux 5.1) on DEC alpha, which was fully 64-bit kernel and user space. We've been running Linux on some seroius DEC alpha machines instead of running DEC's own UNIX implementation (OSF/1) because it actually behaved better.

After I changed my employer in 2002, I had to downgrade to i386 version (being much more stable than amd64 at the time).

The thing is that with state-of-the-art equipment (not considering antiquated nor cutting-edge equipment) the price/performance curve tends to be flat at the low-performance part and then starts to rise towards high-performance. Meaning that at certain capacity upgrading it is not cost effective any more. At this point, one can decide either to upgrade anyhow and handle the increased price/capacity in some way (eg. charging customers more for same service) or not to upgrade and keep consumption under control.

A bit rough example: if you eat say 2 Big Mac per day, each costing you a $, why doesn't McDonalds offer you eat-all-you-can for 60$ per month? This would make their income the same as it is today, right?
Because many users would over consume and/or start throwing food away (even more than they already do). Which means that they'd have much higher costs ...

The fact is that many of heavy-users of unlimited (or nearly unlimited) plans abuse the bandwidth they've given.

Another common misconception is that telcos still pocket absurdly high profits. They do fine, but their profits dropped a lot. A decade ago, most profits in mobile telecommunications went to telcos and telecom equipment manufacturers. Only small share went to VAS providers and handset manufacturers. Recently things turned upside down: most money goes to VAS (Google et co. through advertising money) and smart handset manufacturers (Apple, Google, Samsung, ...) while less money lands n pockets of telcos and consequently telecom equipment manufacturers. One can not make real money selling infrastructure and unlimited plans are final proof of it. And to add a nail to the coffin: there are only a few telecom-grade equipment manufacturers and the competition between them is not as fierce they want us to believe. It's much less fierce than in general IT industry meaning prices are not always falling with sale volume as one would expect.

In short: as telco industry slave (I'm working for them) I can tell you that things are not nearly similar as in general IT, so one can not make direct comparisons.

You pay things metered because this is a perfect way of keeping consumption under control.

It's not actual transferred bit that costs telco. It's overall capacity that costs telco and if overall consumption is kept under a certain threshold, capacity of infrastructure can be kept lower and thus cheaper.
Did you ever notice that 100Mb ethernet switches generally cost slightly less than 1Gb ones and the 10Gb ones are quite significantly more expensive? Ethernet switch is not consumable, it's infrastructure (among other things).

A proper telco-grade base station consumes whole lot of electric power just to provide coverage. And some more to actually pass bits to/from users. It really depends on electricity prices, but that can raise to a few hundred euro per month. If there are only a few users with unlimited wireless broadband plan in the covered area (and thus they enjoy high speed), then their subscription only pays electricity of the base station. There's also backhaul and core network which also associate some expenses.

Those bastards telcos actually want to get their investment paid back in a decent time frame and also make some profit. Old (copper) infrastructure had paid back the investment way back, while new infrastructure (fiber, wireless) did not.

Talk about US petrol prices. In Europe, petrol price is in vicinity of 1.50€ per litre (likely even more), which is in neighbourhood of $7/gallon.

Exactly. So killing everyone's battery isn't due to P2P back-end. Unless smoke is caused by battery being killed.

What exactly is P2P back-end?

In Europe, EU commission passed a decree that we'll also have digital dividend. Frequencies between 790 and 862 MHz will be freed of TV and will be (in some countries already have been) sold for 4G mobile networks. It's a good thing that EC required that ... in some countries (mine included) those frequencies would have remained in (D)TV domain.

Yup, I was implying that I code in English, I just try to make output correctly localized where applicable.

I wouldn't know. I'm not huge fan of CS translations and localizations, at least of those that go beyond proper localized output of data (numbers, dates). I've seen examples of actually translated programming language (Pascal to be exact) which made me sick. Which means that whenever I do programming I end up typing comma as parameter separator and dot as decimal separator. I hate using localized version of OS (Linux or Windows) that backfires me while using its calculator ...

Actually my Excel uses semicolons to separate function arguments. I always wonder why all examples in FAQs, Tutorials etc. insist on commas? Really: everybody that uses comma as decimal sign (think Germany and remember StarDivision) use semicolon as separator sign. I guess OOo devels just adopted it as default/only option not to mess with different locales.

Ah well I think I understand how things work over there.

arkane1234 said that "I'm not understanding how American's are gettign the short end of the stick.". It's not that Americans are not bitten by their cellular market and players thereof. It's that elsewhere the stick being used on customers backs is much longer and thus customers' backs hurt much more.

That's what AC above was trying to say: Americans can buy cheap phones and cheap subscription plans and they still complain.
The rest of the world buy the same devices quite more expensive (unsubsidized gadgets usually cost in Europe the same amount of money as in US while currency in Europe is currently slightly higer valued that the one in US) and also other details about subscription plans are mostly less user-friendly.