Both Verizon and AT&T have made it clear that they want to ditch the current (sort of flat rate) wireless pricing system to one that involves more caps and per-byte overages. That's (and sorry to repeat ourselves) because carriers want to prepare for the inevitable revenue losses they'll see as mobile VoIP and push IM clients begin to erode voice and SMS revenues. The carriers pitch these changes as being about fairness and even altruism, and it works.

Many people (and reporters) hear the sales pitch for these pricing models and think carriers are talking about pure per-byte billing -- where grandma gets a tiny little bill because she only checks the Weather Channel. That's just not the case.

Just like in the terrestrial broadband market, carriers aren't interested in pure pure-byte billing because the vast majority of their users don't use very much data, and would pay lower bills. What executives and investors really want is a funnel-like pricing model that pushes all users toward higher monthly bills, by using mandatory data plans for most phones and unreasonably-low caps on base tiers. This acts to herd consumers to pricier tiers under the illusion of value.

So far most of this rhetoric about a need to change wireless pricing has originated from AT&T and Verizon (and influential sector stock jocks like Craig Moffett). But Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, whose company has actually been using flat rate pricing to compete with AT&T and Verizon through both Sprint and Clear, has suddenly joined the wireless sector chorus. Hesse says wireless industry billing is moving from minutes to gigabytes in two years, whether you like it or not:Of course many people believe the idea of voice minutes will be dead before long. And replacing this model with a pure per-byte billing model that offers value would be one thing, but when executives begin dreaming about charging by the gigabyte, you need to study the proposed pricing models carefully. It's strange that Hesse would be eager for the end of a flat-rate pricing model when it's the very thing they're using (under both the Sprint and Clear brands) to compete with AT&T and Verizon. In fact Clearwire executive Dow Draper spent yesterday at CTIA using unlimited flat-rate service as a selling point for Clear:Neither AT&T and Verizon have officially announced LTE pricing, in part because they're curious to see what kind of pricing consumers will tolerate. If you tell them that low caps and high overages are a good value by buying their service, guess what kind of pricing model you're going to get? Consumers are going to have to pay close attention and ask lots of questions (will my unused gigabytes roll over?) as the wireless data pricing of tomorrow gets hashed out.