I'm a CSR at T-Mobile and I'll weigh in with my .02 cents. The ETF can be waived in only a very few select situations and raising the price of a feature is certainly not one of them. Which btw, we did raise our txt messaging from .05 to .10 cents at the beginning of the year.
Txt messaging is a feature. You can add and remove features at anytime without penalty. However, a rate plan is a requirement and most bound by a contract. If they were to raise the price of the rate plan that you and the provider agreed to in the contract, then you would certainly have the right to opt out of your contract without an ETF. But you did not agree to a contract for any optional features on your account. You agreed to a contract either by a phone purchase/upgrade or rate plan.
I can't really blame anyone for looking for a loophole to get you out of a contract, especially if you are unhappy with some aspect of your service (ex. coverage, rate plan, customer service, etc.) but this isn't one of them. I do feel sorry for those reps that cancelled the contracts over this. They will certainly get in some sort of trouble when its found out through the system of checks and balances I'm sure Cingular has in place...
Imagine from a business standpoint if customers could cancel over a feature price increase. We would lose tons of money over all those free phones we just gave out to customers that would cancel just a few months after getting the phones. We actually lose money initially anytime we get a customer to agree to a two or even a one year contract. That is one reason the ETF's are there, so we can stay in business! After all, Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, etc. don't give us the phones for free. By you agreeing to stay with us for a set amount of time allows us to recoup our money over the course of the contract.
And for those calling Cingular greedy. I am not sure, I don't work there nor am I one of their customers. But I am aware of the tremendous overhead that is involved in being a wireless service provider. Just for the cost of running a single call center, the average cost per call in our call center is around $5. Figure in around 40,000 calls per day and you can see it's not cheap.
Anyways, that's my .02 cents! Happy new year all....