Welcome to the United States of America, where mobile service providers continue to rape our wallets whenever they get the chance. The latest perpetrator is Sprint, who — on top of charging an extra 10 dollars for 4G access to improve the network — has decided that everyone should be charged an access fee of an extra $10 dollars for “premium” 3G access.

Now I’m not going to claim to understand how these mobile carriers can be making millions of dollars, yet I can’t receive but a signal from one of these carriers (Verizon) where I live; however, I do know that if these costs are rising when the networking technology (4G/LTE) is supposedly getting cheaper, someone is making a pretty penny.

The least these networks could do is actually provide better service or customer support. That doesn’t seem to to be happening, though.

Either way, though, it seems like smart phone data is going to continue to get more expensive. It probably won’t be too long before all of these carriers have hard data caps and expensive fees for exceeding them, even when our demand for data is growing.