Following my previous post on unhappy mobile subscribers, I saw a story on RCR a bunch of changes to plans US carriers are making — and all unbelievably and needlessly complex.

They tend to focus on one major point of complaints by US users, the per-minute charges operators levy when a subscriber goes over their allotted minutes in a month. Cingular has the gold standard here, letting users “rollover” unused minutes (ie if they pay for 500 minutes a month, but only use 400, 100 would rollover) and save them to cover future overage. Unsurprisingly, the plan’s been very successful for them. Now, among other initiatives, T-Mobile’s got a new “feature” where users pay $5 per month to get an SMS when they get close to their monthly allotment, then get cut off when they hit it. They can then go buy prepaid cards to add credit to their account at a rate of 10 cents per minute. Keep in mind these are contract customers.

Instead of forcing customers to jump through hoops, particularly if they only occasionally need extra airtime, why not just reduce the overage charges to a reasonable level so people didn’t get so upset when they have to pay them? Here’s to MVNOs…