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When companies introduce certain discounts  like Sprint’s recent offer of free calling to any mobile number  the effect is that customers often switch to more expensive plans.

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One thing that is costing cellphone companies a lot of money to provide is the one thing they offer for a flat rate with no limits: surfing the Web on gadgets like the iPhone.

There is nothing obvious or necessary about this approach to pricing. In many parts of the world, you simply buy a phone from a store, then buy a card that entitles you to talk for a set number of minutes. Use up the card and buy more minutes. No contracts. No surprising charges. No confused economists.

But for all the complexity, cellphones American-style do have a certain supersized logic. Americans spend more money each month on their wireless bills than people in any other country. But the money we spend buys a whole lot more talk time and text messages than it does elsewhere. On average, we effectively spend about 5 cents per minute of talk time and about a penny a text message, lower than anywhere else in the developed world.

Image Credit... Hal Mayforth

This year, the deals are becoming even better. For people who want to surf the Web on their phones, wireless companies are willing to sell them iPhones, BlackBerrys and other sleek gadgets for hundreds of dollars less than they cost. The catch, of course, is that customers need to pay $30 or so extra each month for Internet access. For those who just want to talk and text without a fancy phone, there is hot competition to offer lower- price, unlimited phone plans that don’t require contracts.

In many ways, however, the least important factor in setting prices is the actual cost of providing cellular service. Cellphone companies resemble airlines, that other industry whose oblique prices exasperate consumers. Think of a cellphone network as one giant airplane that costs tens of billions of dollars to build. The cellphone companies don’t really know how much it costs to handle a call to Aunt Suzy in Syracuse, any more than an airline can calculate a specific cost for Seat 12B.