The rapid routine voice-over intoned at TV phone-in voting moments, that final flourish after a litany of cost caveats crammed into the lower third of the screen, delivers a message that millions of mobile phone users seem happy to ignore.

There may have been a time when big companies resisted the imposition of consumer warnings (smoking kills) but it seems that the mobile phone industry is showing signs of appreciating the virtues of trying to be a little more honest – recognising that these handy liability let-outs will not, on balance, diminish the addictive magic of mobile convenience.

Recent adverts now explain that their demonstrations of the latest mobile gizmo (purportedly showing its brilliant performance and ease of use) have essentially been faked - ‘sequence steps shortened and connection speeds may vary’ – but they stop perceptively short of saying out loud “don’t imagine it really works like this”.

What mobile operators are realising is that their money collecting machinery is in danger of working so well that it is likely  to attract further regulatory intervention – so it makes sense to protest their concern for consumers.

European regulators have already addressed ‘excessive’ mobile roaming charges for voice calls and now, with the discovery by consumers of accidental mega-bills (for megabytes of mobile broadband abroad), these same regulators are revisiting the scene to include action on data calls.  Later this year it is likely that customers can expect to be warned when they are about to inadvertently incur a galloping overdraft on their data download accounts.

National regulators have not always been happy with interventions from Brussels or the implicit criticism of being slow to respond to consumer interests.  During the mobile roaming saga the UK’s early position on European intervention was very much on the side of championing the industry’s interest.

It’s in this regulatory competitive context that Ofcom’s recent deliberation on Mobile Termination Rates (MTR) – the fees charged by operators for delivering traffic generated by other operators -  and a video on the risks of unexpected bills, are  welcome signs.

The various MTR reductions will certainly help to level the competitive playing field within the industry but it is rather less clear whether any of the cost savings will feed through to retail prices.   But maybe that’s not the point;  better perhaps to be seen to adopt a less-than-light regulatory touch than to attract the criticism now being heaped on all regulatory bodies for being unconcerned with market realities and insufficiently interventionist.

At the heart of these consumer cost concerns is a collision, but not yet a convergence, of two very different ways of doing business.

Consumers' Internet expectations have largely been fixed by the fixed-line brigade with the benefit of sunk costs for access infrastructure and revenue growth (often vertically integrated with services) judged against marginal, incremental, costs.

To justify vast infrastructure investment for new and unproven markets, mobile operators needed, from inception, to work out how any of this makes commercial sense.  So, whilst we all enjoy simple flat rate charges for Internet access on fixed broadband lines, on our mobiles we must pay for the content consumed.

The distinction between an Access utility and the Services that are transported across it has never been so stark.  As IPTV traffic grows it doesn’t just become starker; it brings on the pains for ISP’s who have to handle the traffic and it makes for more angry consumers who find that investment in their local access utility is woefully inadequate.  Last generation copper lines are increasingly unfit for purpose and no-one can reasonably expect mobile technologies to fill this void.

The mobile industry may have the better business model but they lack the technology to deliver the goods.  The fixed-line world needs to invest in local access infrastructure (e.g. FTTH) but lacks the business model to pay for it – or at least hasn’t yet recognised that it’s time to learn a thing or three from those mobile upstarts.

So regulators and operators, fixed or mobile, at home or abroad, should be thinking more about convergence and less about political point-scoring.  It would be nice to have a content-cost-free world but only one thing seems certain.  Calls from mobiles will (not may) cost considerably more until such time as all consumers learn to value their content consumption.