It seems that carriers are cracking down on content providers who aren’t following the Mobile Marketing Association’s guidelines when it comes to premium messages and content. According to RCR Wireless, Sprint was the first carrier to begin fining non-compliant content providers and supposedly other carriers are following suit:

Sprint Nextel Corp. earlier this year became the first U.S. carrier to formally tie revenue shares to business practices, warning that partners who repeatedly violate Mobile Marketing Association guidelines—by incurring high refund rates, for instance, or not reporting billing errors to the carrier—can forfeit every dime and lose their short codes.

“Non-compliant short code campaigns will receive penalties up to and including program termination from Sprint Nextel Boost networks,” the carrier said in a confidential five-page memo. “Conversely, revenue-share incentives may be applied for programs performing will on policy compliance.”

Other U.S. carriers are quietly following in Sprint Nextel’s footsteps, according to Jay Emmett, general manager of the Amdocs subsidiary OpenMarket, which distributed Sprint Nextel’s memo and handles billing issues for the carrier. (rest of article here.)

Well, I’ll be.

Verizon is giving its prepaid customers a bit of a break. For just $10 a month, it’s letting those subscribers send unlimited text, picture, and video messages to other Verizon users, and to non-Verizon subscribers, they can send 250 messages. (You can read the RCR article about it here.)

This comes just a few weeks after T-Mobile raised its charge for texting from 15 to 20 cents a message, just as Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T have done in the recent past. This raised quite a few dogs’ hackles. One in particular at CrunchGear.com had a bone to pick with AT&T when he did the math and realized that at $0.20 per 160 bytes, 1MB of data would cost $1310.72.

I suppose that Verizon got a whiff of the stink that followed that whole texting debacle and decided to throw us dogs a bone.

Woof.

Hello mobileteers!

I thought you all might find this interesting. I know that I’m always looking for mobile stats, and as far as stats go, this is a good one.

Last week RCR Wireless posted the top ten mobile carriers in the US. Here’s the list with each carrier’s subscriber base:

1. AT&T Mobility     71.4 million
2. Verizon Wireless     67.2 million
3. Sprint Nextel     52.8 million
4. T-Mobile USA     30.8 million
5. Alltel     13.2 million
6. US Cellular     6.2 million
7. MetroPCS     4.4 million
8. Leap Wireless     3.09 million
9. Centennial     662,700
10. Rural Cellular     790,431

For the rest of the article, check out RCR Wireless News.