[pyre]

How are pre-paid plans any different than making sure that your car has enough fuel in the tank? People don't by gasoline on post-paid plans. The real issue here is that there is no standard/easy way of knowing how many minutes you have left (i.e. fuel gauge). People have a good handle on how long a minute is, and they could easily read a countdown ticker on their phone. People go for unlimited because, "if $10 for 250 minutes is a good deal, then $30 for infinity minutes is a better deal!" You also have to add in the laziness factor (i.e. If I have unlimited minutes, then I don't have to worry about buying more minutes if I ever need to use more minutes in a given month).

Data is different because many people have no idea what a kilobyte or a megabyte is, let alone how much bandwidth each site they visit uses, and that's not counting all of the background communication from Apps or Ajax requests from web pages.

People know how to cut back on water usage. People know how to cut back on electricity usage. People know how to cut back on phone usage. A lot of people haven't the faintest clue on how to cut back on data usage other than maybe, "use the web less," but they don't know which things use bandwidth and which don't, or which things use more bandwidth than others.