[Onkel Neal]

Breaking Free of the Cellphone Carrier Conspiracy

It's not a conspiracy, really, more of a racket. But that may be changing.

Last week, the landscape changed. T-Mobile violated the unwritten conspiracy code of cellphone carriers. It admitted that the emperors have no clothes. John J. Legere, T-Mobile’s chief executive, took to the stage not only to expose the usurious schemes, but to announce that it wouldn’t be playing those games anymore.

It was a Steve Jobs moment: when somebody got so fed up with the shoddy way some business is being run (say, phone design or selling music) that he reinvented it, disruptively.

I'm especially happy about this

T-Mobile is the first major carrier to eliminate the ridiculous, unnecessary, airtime-eating, 15 seconds of prerecorded instructions that you hear when you want to leave a message. (“To page this person, press 5 ... When you have finished recording, you may hang up.”) When you call a T-Mobile customer, you go right to the beep. Someone should organize a parade.