Slashdot Mirror
World's First SMS Text Messaging May Fade Soon
Infractor writes: "UK Mobile provider Orange has moved to pull the plug on the world's first ever text message community -- Locust Cellular
Linux hacker Jon Anderson built the service, similar to wireless email and IRC chat back in 1996. A student Linux project, accidently became the first service to offer interactive text message facilities on this UK network. After Locust's forced closure was announced to its members, a huge campaign has been organised by the subscribers to draw attention to the incredible value which has been created by this unique SMS community." (There's more below.)
"Hundreds of personal letters and testimonials have already been posted on the community action site which is at SaveLocust.org -- This site also has an expose on what is described as 'Orange's Hypocrisy' over claims that it is launching a competitive service to Locust. An article has already appeared on TheRegister.co.uk
For the UK, this is a unique social phenomena, driven by the power and intimacy of text messaging. Please review the evidence for yourself. This community shows what technology can really do in the wireless world. Locust still runs on good ole Linux 2.0.33 -- if it aint broke ... :)"
Here in Australia sms is usually around 20 a message. I really want to see the cost come down and the complete introduction of mobile icq. Already you can sms from your icq and sms to icq for some carriers in some countries.
What is great about ICQ is you catch up with someone when you may not have even considered calling them ( you just see them on). THis would be great if extented to mobiles and you always got a list of your friends (and otherwise) that had their mobiles turned on.
Yup, genuine value for your money, unfortunately it doesn't fit with Orange's business model i.e. to make money, not give services away for free.
Nobody really expected SMS to take off in the way it did, hell some networks didn't even have SMS capability, so you can't blame Orange if what seemed like a good idea at the time suddenly starts costing the company a lot of money, and is thus withdrawn or re-modeled.
As I see it, if Locust is as good as everyone seems to think, they won't mind paying to use it, and another deal can be struck. If not then it will go under.
smacks of free as in beer, rather than free as in speech here.
cmclean
"Any similarity between the hooting of a million eager monkeys and Slashdot is purely coincidental." -THEFLASHMAN
.... reminds me of a regional finance company that specialises in infrastructure funding (things like ring-roads, traffic bypasses, fibre, etc). They built a high-speed traffic bypass asnd started charging tolls. However, they found out residents were still using local roads so they did a deal with the state authority repsonsible for public roads to seal them off.
:-).
The point is that they did the conomic analysis and showed that there was a net savings in petrol consumption and driver's time. But in order for them to pay for building the new infrastructure, they had to convince motorists that there was no longer a free-ride. The problem is that motorists only saw the daily toll charges and not the weekly savings in petrol/time. Not to mention that very little advance warning was given to changing the road access. You can probably guess the PR fallout resulting from this
Sooner or later a similar scenario will happen with communications networks as they reach the limits of scaiability and in order to transition to a more efficient/lower cost/reduced maintenance system, they need to convince people of the benefits of switching This usually requires changing their usage patterns. Unfortunately aggressive telco upstarts don't always have the diplomatic skills to address customer's expectations. Pricing is a particularly sensitive point as there may be incredible customer acquisition costs or hidden cross-subsidies that distort the cost structure.
There has probably been some over-investments in network infrastructure that the current recession is revealing. As Warrne Buffett says, it's only when the tide goes out that you see who's swimming naked. Companies that pass the buck (literally) for their corporate mistakes are going to have a hard time keeping onto their customer base and will have to either swallow the losses (and shock horror forfeit the CEO bonuses/options) or else try and merge to gain monopoly pricing power and justify their executive packages. While some people may decry the double-sided nature of telcos and Wall Street, hopefully the survivors will be more sensitive to their users's needs.
LL
Why? The WAP portal is where the Euro providers really want their subscribers to go for information, news, etc. GPRS will give WAP some semblance of usability, after the initial flop, and many Euro providers, including the one I work for, have invested millions in their portal offerings. The old style SMS messaging services like this one are OK, as long as you agree to pay for the messages they send you, but anything that detracts from the portal is definitely not on the A-list.
Bottom line, the providers gotta pay down the G3 licenses, and SMS (eventually packetized SMS) is probably the best way to "migrate" the population slowly into G3 without losing the SMS-crazed kids who pay the bills.
This is another example of free services coming to an end. More and more cellular providers are blocking messages sent from "free SMS websites" as well. Of course this could be expected... for telecoms and the Internet to be the mega-profitable businesses they were hyped to be, the customers will have to PAY for service. Offering free services is not going to yield you money. Free services were only a teaser to get customers interested.
I think this misses the point. Locust has about 600 users, who pay L3/month. That's L1800/month income. The zero-point cost for a billing system is probably more than this. Billing in arrears would also expose Locust to the risk of default which they don't currently have. Whether or not Locust *wants* to charge per message it probably cannot do so and remain anything like it is at present: it either would need to grow enormously to justify the overhead of the billing system, or it would need to crank up the base charge by a large factor.
Really, billing is viable if it's either flat-rate, in advance (like locust currently is), or if you're huge (like Orange). So what Orange are *actually* saying is that they just aren't interested in small operations: unless you can afford a billing system they don't care.
This is actually very pertinent to the net: the reason the net as we know it today exists is because people could do small-scale experiments without having to worry about billing. You could write a system to send messages from one machine to another without having to stress away about charging per message, and suddenly you've invented email or news, and later on you could invent some crappy little SGML-based networked hypertext system and arrogantly call it the `world wide web' when it only ran at CERN anyway, and you could do these kinds of experiments because you weren't getting billed per packet, and so you didn't have to worry about passing on that cost to the users. An argument that's often heard in the UK is that the net took off better in the US because *local calls are free*.
The moment you have to worry about billing you're in an entirely different place. You have to make business cases and worry about risk of default. Worst of all you have to have a billing system which means nightmare database hell and lots of paper and so on. If your basic transaction is very small, like an SMS or an email, or a packet, you stand a serious chance of your costs being completely dominated by the billing overhead. I don't know the figures for telcos but I bet a really large chunk of their profit is eaten by the billing system.
I think there's really a lot of evidence that having to worry about billing simply stifles a lot of innovation. Of course, Orange can say `well, so what?', and that is their right. But I think its a catastrophically dumb decision, because they (and the other telcos) really need to foster innovation, because no one
really has much idea where to go next. They've kind of done voice, since everyone now has a mobile phone (maybe not yet in the US, but Europe is pretty saturated). SMS was this thing that no-one saw coming that has been hugely successful, but it works fine on 2G networks. So they've now spent enormous money on 3G and they really have no idea what to do with it - video is not going to be that interesting, neither is the web, and no one knows what is, really).
But they can't see this - they're so panic stricken because they've spent this huge amount of money, that they are obsessing away about making everything they do profitable and trying to rake in money from SMS traffic (which, really, must be a big money earner: people send billions and billions of SMSs), instead of actually thinking a bit and allowing some lunatic in a basement to play with some idea without having to buy Oracle to do the billing. Of course they probably don't want to allow a huge company to do this, but that's easily arranged by just throttling the bandwidth that Locust (say) can have: then they can't grow beyond an experiment.
What is saddest of all is that they are missing a huge trick here. The problem is that billing costs don't scale down. But the telcos already have a billing system, they are large so the costs aren't too bad, and they have this really big stick to beat their customers with: pay up or we cut off your phone. So the obvious thing for them to do is to get into bed with the little innovative people to provide a billing service, which they can do at small extra cost, and which would enable innovation to procede without the crippling overhead. Even better, you only get the service if you're a customer of the telco concerned, because they need to be able to bill you, so you probably move your phone to them too. This probably isn't right for locust-as-it-stands, but some kind of semi-locust type thing could do this, if only the telcos had half a brain between them.
--tim
Ha ha ha. The problem is that some greedy looser always wants to come between people and what they want. It's the "asshole in the middle" idea. The usual line is that they know better and that things will really be improved with you giving them money.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
We just have to hope that they don't pass on the delivery cost to the consumer
Oh yes, heaven forbid that the user starts to pay for what they use. That would be horrible. I suggest that we increase taxes. Just don't let them pass the delivery cost along to the consumer. I mean, if that was to happen, all the poor users who don't use the specialty services might actually pay less. And that wouldn't be fair, either.
It's the same as with any internet service provider...Sure, they already have the hardware in place for you to dial into them, and it doesn't cost them more than a few cents' electrons to stay connected for an hour.
But they're still charging you for a convenience, aka. a service.
What's this Submit thingy do?