"They (apparently) didn't anticipate seeing a significant percentage of their customers try to use the cellular networks for transferring large quantities of data, and thought that for most people "unlimited" would just be a marketing-friendly euphemism for "a couple hundred megabytes.""

I wonder if many execs and marketing people at large mobile companies really didn't see this coming, as we had years of 'unlimited texts' being promoted, and an entire generation of people texting thousands of times per day. Did execs get adjusted to 'unlimited' as it applies to texting, and naively assume that 'web' usage wouldn't be significantly different?

I can't really say for sure, but that just struck me as a possibility for why many mobile execs don't seem to 'get it' with respect to mobile data.