The New York Times has an article about prepaid cell phone plans.  Mostly it’s a PR peice triggered by the roll out of MetroPCS in New York (and Boston).  The article is pretty worthless.  But the chart is pretty good.

It’s interesting how a decade ago the demographics of the  discriminatory  pricing was  primarily  done by targeting different buyer groups via branding.  T-mobile’s prepaid was targeted to poor urban youth, for example.  That’s not me, and I had trouble even finding somebody to sell it to me.  These days the virtual mobile phone operators do that, more so than the majors.  Page Plus Cellular is a good example, and they sell mostly thru small urban store fronts.

When I bought the t-mobile service all those years ago I was routing around their  discriminatory  filters.  They, of course, would prefer that I not be able to do that.  The rise of text messaging and data services is making that easier.  Three services (text, voice, data) makes for a rich pallet for market segmentation.  I love Adam’s term for industries that depend on these practices: confusopolies.