What is Digg?288 Comments
- menwuur, on 07/02/2008, -0/+484Text messages should be a free feature of phones. It's ridiculous paying for that *****.
- StingingNettle, on 07/02/2008, -4/+311Stp txting me! U jst $ me .20.
- RedCt, on 07/02/2008, -1/+250Now that's what I call a rip-off.
- phore, on 07/02/2008, -0/+210The thing I don't understand is if you pay for unlimited data, why do they still charge you so much for text messages? Its just an excuse to inflate customer's phone bills. Texts take up a lot less data than even a 20 second phone call or a single e-mail.
- Shigglyboo, on 07/02/2008, -3/+126what's F'd up is people without text plans still have to pay for incoming texts, and they cannot block them.
This is why these types of companies are so rich. They find ways to make dollars out of pennies without actually providing a service. It's like how you pay $40 for 600 minutes, but if you go over by 100 minutes they want $50. that markup is insane. I actually won a BBB dispute against T-mobile with that logic. They could not justify the price per minute. My bill was wiped clean, they offered me a new phone and I went from 600 to 1000 minutes for the same price. - KittySpark1es, on 07/02/2008, -0/+117text messages are the monster cables of cellular communication
- mywhitenoise, on 07/02/2008, -0/+107Phone service in general is a rip-off.
- TonyBLiar, on 07/02/2008, -0/+78The UK President of Vodafone is on record as saying that Text Messaging is "..the purest form of profit ever devised"
- rpi22, on 07/02/2008, -0/+73text messages are less demanding on their network. Think about it, packet switching only uses a microscopic amount of network resources compared to the network switching required to maintain a continuous circuit to for a live conversation.
text messaging should be WAAAAY cheaper than live converations. - floridiot2, on 07/02/2008, -3/+70my bff jill?
- orlyfactor, on 07/02/2008, -3/+62Soon I will have no bff's :(
- alpharaptor, on 07/02/2008, -2/+58they won't do it because they hate their customers
- mattlohkamp, on 07/03/2008, -1/+53omg orly? ur fone sux lol
- grey580, on 07/02/2008, -12/+62i smell class action
- alen3K, on 07/02/2008, -1/+50LOL. I heard that in the US you get charged for getting SMS-es.
- TheVigilante, on 07/02/2008, -1/+49Yeah I had to subscribe to their stupid 5 dollar plan so I could get 200 text messages. It's cheaper than paying for the texts out of pocket but I remember back when texts were 10 cents to send only. Those were the days...
- helfire, on 07/03/2008, -0/+48noahhoward, I hope one day you realize just how stupid that really was.
160 BYTES max per txt
160*63,300,000 = 10,128,000,000 bytes = 9.43243504 gigabytes
If a world wide network cant handle that puny amount of data per day we have bigger problems. - inactive, on 07/02/2008, -1/+48idk
- billbugger, on 07/02/2008, -1/+42sry
- ryan899, on 07/02/2008, -0/+41I'd relate it more to printer ink at $8000 a gallon.
- KMartSheriff, on 07/02/2008, -5/+44Yes, the huge ungodly large text messages. 160 bytes, my God, how do the phone companies manage to stay in business! I'm so glad you enlightened me. Now I'll happily pay $20 a month for....I'm sorry, I can't keep this ***** up anymore.
- lepton, on 07/02/2008, -0/+39People don't seem to fully understand they charge you $0.20 to send a text message, and the other guy $0.20 to receive it! And yes, many people are on the pay-per-text rate. It's a huge money maker.
- kuwan, on 07/03/2008, -0/+35It's basically printing money. According to the following Slashdot comment the actual cost to a cell carrier for SMS is 0:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=433536& ...
I know the true cost of SMS messages!
I made a paper for the univeristy some years ago. The marginal cost of a SMS is 0.
They do have a little cost/opportunity. As a matter of fact SMS messages are sent on the control channel. Initially SMS were implemented in the GSM standard as a control system, just like the ICMP protocol of the IP stack. Then NOKIA though to implement a actual instant message function using SMS. The Contol channel is the channel that your mobile listens to in order to receive calls. So for receiving a SMS a control signal is sent. Since bandwidht is somehow limited on these channels it could happen that in a situation of massive usage of texting the control channel gets saturated and normal voice protocol initiation is disrupted. To prevent this carriers nowadays apply a kind of QoS delaying SMSs until there is no risk of congestion. So we can state that the marginal cost is 0 and the cost/opportunity is also 0
Another story is for the MMSs. Their cost/opportunity is even lower since they run almost enterely on GPRS thus using most bandwidht on normal data channels. Thus a MMS with pictures sounds and maybe video SHOULD cost less than a SMS.
So you wonder, why do I pay so much for a SMS or a MMS or even a Call: after the debts for the initial hardware infrastructure have been paid by the carrier you are still paying because of market segmentation (You won't change the carrier on the fly) and a little monopoly (Almost impossible to start a new carrier from 0). - sdrawkcaB, on 07/02/2008, -0/+35You know it's a ripoff if Canada has better txt rates. Having to pay to receive text msgs is even more insane.
- ken830, on 07/03/2008, -0/+34The math is wrong... Standard SMS is 160 7-bit characters (160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters). That's 1,120 bits or 140 bytes.
That's 0.142857143 cents per byte or $1,497.96571 per Megabyte. - bs0l, on 07/02/2008, -1/+35lol
- theCreator79, on 07/02/2008, -2/+34Where's the FCC?? Oh, that's right, they are getting a cut of the $$$$!!!
- Aero347, on 07/03/2008, -1/+33Why aren't the cell phone companies offering a lure of 'free unlimited texting with any phone plan'? Why isn't capitalism and a free market serving us the customers?
I'll tell you why.
Cell phone companies collaborate and think customers and Americans are R-R-R-RET-T-T-Tarded. - eengineer, on 07/02/2008, -0/+31not even jill?
- jason0802, on 07/02/2008, -2/+31why would there be a class action? they offer a paid service that you voluntarily choose to accept
as long as people continue to pay - then nothing will change
just simple market forces at work - MasterGrief, on 07/03/2008, -0/+29Not even Jill.
- zzz@tkz, on 07/02/2008, -1/+28A text with a photo isn't a SMS. It's a MMS.
Regardless, they're all the same: emails. Literately speaking.
I have an unlimited data plan, I should be able to send unlimited data regardless of how it looks externally. - masamunecyrus, on 07/03/2008, -0/+27It costs more than sending data to and from Hubble.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/12/sms-data-rate ... - moo113, on 07/02/2008, -0/+26I remember when $5 got you unlimited texts, now those were the days. Now I pay $15 for 2500.
- JHaze, on 07/03/2008, -0/+26K
- CLShortFuse, on 07/02/2008, -3/+29Working as a customer service rep is hard enough without having an annoying bastard on the line demanding them constantly to add something to their account for free. If you want pricing infrastructure change, don't call CSR.
- Falldog, on 07/02/2008, -0/+26"The thing I don't understand is if you pay for unlimited data, why do they still charge you so much for text messages?" "Its just an excuse to inflate customer's phone bills."
Ya sorta answered yourself there. - Helicobacter, on 07/02/2008, -3/+29Is the SMS feature mandatory in the new AT&T iPhone plan? I mean you could always access the Internet and use one of those free services...
- sockpuppets, on 07/02/2008, -1/+25I'm surprised the BBB actually did anything for you. Everyone I've spoken to say they're fairly worthless.
- mattlohkamp, on 07/03/2008, -0/+24... but they love our money!
- str1fe, on 07/03/2008, -3/+26My bff Rose.
- guk6kk, on 07/02/2008, -2/+24I hope they introduce Skype app for the iPhone...free calls all day...
- StephenCIreland, on 07/02/2008, -1/+22DUDE WHAT !!!!, you have to pay to receive messages where ?????? even if i roam to the othe rside of the world its still free to receive,
- ZeroFeetAbove, on 07/02/2008, -1/+21I live in Canada, land of ***** cell service, and I get unlimited texts, voicemail and call display for 10$/month. This is a horrible for you guys in the states.
- bosox3125, on 07/03/2008, -1/+20sucky part is, they USED to be free!! circa 1998
- Namelessthinker, on 07/03/2008, -1/+18http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/b/b ...
- masamunecyrus, on 07/03/2008, -0/+17You didn't mention how much bandwidth PHONE CALLS take up. Here in Japan, text messages are cheap or free, and it's phone calls that cost money.
I might add that there's two types of text-messages, as well: C-Mail and E-Mail. C-Mail (call mail?) goes through like a standard phone, so if the recipient is busy on their phone, it will fail to send. E-Mail is just like the internet, and I can send messages to anyone I want with an e-mail address, and anyone can send my phone messages. - StephenCIreland, on 07/02/2008, -1/+17not really, the MMS protocol supports 1000 character text messages and works ove rthe data channels. in Ireland these cost 5 cent. the price only goes up when you add pictures, i often find it an easy way to get messages through on newyears etc..
- str1fe, on 07/03/2008, -0/+16They charge that much because they know people are willing to pay it and know they can get away with it.
- rancemo, on 07/02/2008, -3/+19If texting were included, many people would drastically reduce their voice usage. AT&T is just trying to prevent lost revenue from voice usage reduction.
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