Step 1: create all-you-can eat plans for Voice, Text and Data that people can actually afford.

Check! Verizon, and Sprint have it, and we’re getting there on AT&T.

One problem is “unlimited” data still being limited by carriers, such as AT&T supposedly limiting to 5 gigs transfer per month. So we’ll see what the T&C’s are on these plans when they hit steady state.

Carreirs, meanwhile, expressed their concern, but no real good plan of avoiding the dumb pipe model at Mobile World Congress. Web 2.0 style services won’t serve them here - it’s not their core competency. But I’m sure we’ll see some valiant efforts at it - probably right as the flood of social networks is maxed and people start leaving them in droves.

But, make no mistake - there are plenty of data plans you can buy for reasonable prices and pretty much use normally without worry. What I’m hoping for here are carriers focusing on streamlining their businesses to purely provide connectivity, reducing operating costs, and competing on price points so that the masses - not just businesses and techies - will have solid mobile data plans. At that point, companies who are actually good at Web 2.0-style services can make big time mobile business models and have a non-trivial addressable user base.