Carrier fees for processing mobile payment are reportedly falling. However, they still remain extraordinarily high compared to merchant processing fees.

Ron Hirson of Boku, which has essentially created a network of carriers willing to process payments, told CrunchGear recently that the carrier rates are “coming down.” Hirson said carrier fees around the world range from 5% to 45%, and that the carrier fees charged by Verizon and AT&T in the US are at the low end of that range.

But even 5% of the total transaction amount is high, in my view. The trade off of the convenience of processing a payment through a carrier vs. its high cost is going to continue to be a major factor in mobile payments for some time. The 5% makes that trade off rational — a 45% carrier fee does not.

Boku, for example, has placed its eggs in the carriers’ basket, and that might not be a good thing. Here’s how CrunchGear explains it:

[B]eing in bed with the carriers could be risky. Their historical cut has been prohibitively high. It sounds like their required percentage is dropping though, possibly signaling they may realize they have to nurture this space if they want to see it grow. Another big question though deals with whether or not carriers want to underwrite big purchases on post-paid accounts. That could be a very complicated undertaking and I see [that] as a potential barrier. But, if they can all get the numbers right, this could be big time. We’ll see.

That’s essentially the bottom line. I would argue that the carriers right now remain in a position of power and only Facebook and Apple have the potential to change that dynamic. If carrier fees drop dramatically, they could secure a vast swatch of global payments. They need to be thinking about the billions, rather than millions, of transactions they can coop. Maybe they start pricing more like the big-three card processors — and then we’ll really see mobile payments take off like a rocket on caffeine.