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 ... :)"

Comments

This was always a good service

[Llanfairpwllgwyngyll]

I used this service for a long time. It was always reliable (and you could even play chess against it on long train journeys :-)

It would be a great shame to lose it. Last time it was under threat was when Orange changed from a flat monthly fee for SMS (2 quid a month, unlimited SMS) to a charge-per-SMS (0.05 GBP per message). A deal was struck then that kept Locust online.

It will be a sad day if it shuts - genuine innovation and genuine value-for-money :-(

Re:This was always a good service

[cmclean]

genuine innovation and genuine value-for-money

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Orange if what seemed like a good idea at the time suddenly starts costing the company a lot of money, and is thus withdrawn or re-modeled.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

Re:This was always a good service

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

Obviously you've only used the service and never had to put in any work to support it. Trust me, it doesn't just spring out of thin air

Re:This was always a good service

[mmol_6453]

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.

SMS messaging

[joonasl]

To bad a genuinely helpful and uncommercally started SMS community will shut down. Atleast here in Finland most of the available SMS services are run by the operators and are generally shameless rip offs for your money.. "Order your biorythm to your mobile, only 1 per message"

Let's look at the facts here...

[The Dodger]

Locust is a profit-making company. It's in their interests to maintain the status quo, because it provides them with a model for making money.

Locust's Terms and Conditions say include the statement that Locust reserves the right to change price plans or service features at any time if required, yet when Orange exercise the same right, they start kicking and screaming.

There are other mobile phone network operators in the UK - Vodafone, Cellnet, One2One. Why doesn't Locust talk to one of them with a view to switching providers?

I'm sorry, but I don't really see what the big deal is here. Seems to be another case of people wanting something without having to pay for it, both in terms of the disgruntled Locust users, and the people who profit from it.

Re:Let's look at the facts here...

[cmclean]

Wouldn't you get a bit annoyed off if Slashdot were forced into suddenly charging you 5c per page

Nope, I'd probably get some work done ;-)

cmclean

Re:Let's look at the facts here...

[tfb]

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

Is locust doomed anyway?

[reachinmark]

What will happen when GPRS becomes more common? Many of the services that Locust offer via SMS seem much more naturally suited to GPRS. It may be that Locust will run out of users in the long-run anyway as these services become more common place as part of a GPRS subscription.

Analogy to road infrastructure ...

[LL]

.... 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

Not that Jon Anderson...

[stereoroid]

On top of all the Locust problems, Jon must be getting a bit sick of being mistaken for a progressive rock singer..! (The other Jon Anderson is a member of Yes)

A bit of history

[matthew.thompson]

Locust is and always was used by a minority of users. 600 users out of Orange's 10,000,000.

It sprang up out of Orange's original free SMS service. Back in the days when SMS was hardly ever used and it was impossible to SMS across competing phone networks Orange offered, for £2.50 per month, SMS sending and receiving with no charges per message - and they didn't charge the monthly fee either.

This was on the basis that Orange hadn't perfected the system and that later on they would start to charge for the service - something that was told to everyone who signed up. Because of this Locust was able to start using very basic technology (A unix box and a phone with a serial cable) and reasonable low overheads.

When Orange started charging for Text messages they offered Text1500, a bulk text message service for £60 per month which offered unlimited messages.

At this rate, with Locust sending out 300,000 messages per month it was costing them about £0.0002 per message for the over the air portion. This compares very favourable to the £0.02 that other SMS sending services charge.

Companies today, more so with the economy slowing, are trying to make more money out of all of their subscribers and this is just one way that Orange have found to try and do that.

Also of note is that the same people as run Locust offer commercial SMS services run "properly" (Linked to mobile networks rather than using a mobile phone on a PC).

Re:A bit of history

[kevin lyda]

but your math fails to make sense. it's my understanding that locust users are paying full price for sms messages, so orange is getting the full price there.

sms consumes a tiny bit of resources. if locust is shut down on the 18th, orange won't have more capacity, but it will have less sms messages which means less money. bandwidth, once there is always there, the only real way to make money with it is to make sure it gets used.

Re:A bit of history

[matthew.thompson]

Although Orange would be getting full whack from the subscribers sending messages they are getting 1/300th or less of the revenue from the SMS sent via Locust. Plus Locust can generate more than one SMS in response to an email or command send by the user.

I'm assuming that Orange have done the arithmetic and worked out that any revenue lost from customers sending messages TO locust is made up by no longer having to subsidise Locust's services.

Out of curiosity I also wonder wether Orange were sending a bill to Locust with all 300,000 text messages per month detailed. Lot's of trees there.

M@t :o)

This is not a WAP portal

[imrdkl]

and therefore, it's got to go.

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.

Great company

[twoshortplanks]

I used to use Locus back in the days when I didn't have a internet connection at home (I lived in halls at uni and we had no landline) to tell me when I got email on a particular address so that I could nip across if I was, say, in the student bar, and read the mail. Importantly it was free for each SMS (unlike any other provider) so spammers didn't end up costing me a fortune.

Of course now I have broadband at home and fat pipes at work I don't need this anymore, but back then it was a real boon.

I guess what I'm saying is that these guys offered a real innovative service which I was really grateful for, and I wish them the best in the future.

No thanks, France Telecom

[Stonehead]

France Telecom, Orange, Dutchtone, whatever it's named.. I have a Dutchtone phone myself, and found myself very irritated when Dutchtone appeared to block incoming messages from www.mtnsms.com, and several other free sites. Is that what I pay my monthly subscription for? Oh no, that's supposed to be for the calls I *make*.. Goddamn! Why can't any telecom company in Europe understand that the customer wants the flat fee model? I don't want to pay for every call, message or whatever I send or receive. Fuck off with your business models! I already feel like I'm an object to press money out of, and I'm not the only one. Protests don't work, and the lone providers who *are* good tend to switch to the Orange model as well - just again, because of the money...
When do these companies learn that I just don't want to spend more than, say $20 per month on my phone? I am not going to use WAP if that's going to cost more. Or I-Mode (whatever it is) or all those lame expensive services. I love to improve my life with better technology, but this is something else. To misquote their advertisements: the only thing that's easy to understand about telecom is that they want all my money.

WAP will die...

[MosesJones]

WAP has failed once, and will fail again. Look to the Far East to see where the market will go, it isn't WAP its rich guis and more complex apps.

Java and other "rich" languages will be running on the next generation of mobile phones. WAP was a short term attempt to con people into buying pointless phones. WAP requires always on networking, something that doesn't exist in a tunnel or a tube, rich apps handle network failure and network blips.

The future is out there in Japan and the Far East. It is SMS, it is MMS (multi-media messaging system) and it is rich apps. Its not WAP, and the providers don't really like WAP as its not giving them the sorts of services they feel people will pay for. Go grap the Nokia 9210, bulky today it maybe, but this is the sort of capabilities that all devices will have in the next year. Its got full web-browsing, not just WAP, Java, full PIM etc etc etc.

RICH Apps, Reliable Apps, and an end to crappy browser screens. Over the air provisioning of services, its already in the Far East, and it will come to Europe next.

Re:WAP will die...

[elem]

WAP may not have broad acceptance but it does have niche markets where it is used quite often. For example there was an article in the Saturday Times about six months ago which was basicly about how technology is changing british agriculture and in it it had several farmers saying that they find WAP very usefull because it allows them to check the weather and crop prices while they are in fields, instead of having to cut into their 'free time' when they are at home to check these. I for one find WAP very usefull then I am on the move as it allows me read all the news on CNN.com

Java and other "rich" languages will be running on the next generation of mobile phones.

WAP is not a language. WAP (Wireless Aplication Protocol) is a protocol just like HTTP, of which it is (to an extent) a subset. It is just a way of get information to a handset with limited resources in terms of handset overhead and bandwidth. The place where java will appear in phones in on the OS level where Java's native features will be best place to work with the wide range of media that will be pushed to out phones by 3G carriers.

The future is out there in Japan and the Far East. It is SMS, it is MMS (multi-media messaging system) and it is rich apps. Its not WAP

You're right, its not WAP, but neither is it SMS or MMS. If you look at the far east the only place where you'll find interesting new things on your mobile is Japan. In Japan their largest mobile telco (DoCoMo) offers a service called i-mode, this is actually just a slightly cut down 3G protocol and has nothing to do with SMS or MMS. In europe GPRS will help to offer similar services untill 3G networks are fully rolled out.

The 9210 does have some nice features, but since it need a bag to carry it in I'd rather sitck with my laptop and my 6210 expecially since the 6210 offer high-speed data access (when you use it with Orange in the UK, I don't know about other places)

I think we should be happy with WAP for offering a service to a neich market instead of criticising it simply because it doesn't offer you everything that you want.

Re:Mobile ICQ

[jquirke]

Vodafone Australia apparently offers ICQ from phone functionality, they can afford it possibly because they have no customers.

It is rumored that Telstra will be offering free SMS next year, I have no idea if there is any truth to that. In any case it's no good to me because I'm with Optus.

But I agree, 20c, or rather 22c inc GST to send 200 bytes of data across the network is ridiculous, hardly "excellent value" as the telcos describe it. Imagine if your ISP charged with those rates!

It had to come

[seizer]

Mobile operators have been kicked in the head by the amazing takeoff of SMS messages. Globally, about 750 million messages get sent a day (that's no typo, check out http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_28.html for the scoop. Operators have had to revamp their pricing structure a bit - for instance, they're all now negotiating a "pay me to deliver" (dunno what it's really called) structure, whereby operators charge other operators to receive SMS from their network. Currently, it's screwed up international SMSing (Vodafone won't let me use Excell anymore, for instance). But at this SCALE of messaging, it was bound to come. We just have to hope that they don't pass on the delivery cost to the consumer - I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.

Re:It had to come

[dstone]

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.

Re:Mobile ICQ

[big_nipples]

My Sprint PCS phone here in the states allows me to log in to AIM...

Unfortunately, per-minute charges apply, which makes it much easier to just call the person I want to talk to...

what a great analogy, tolls

[Erris]

The problem is that motorists only saw the daily toll charges and not the weekly savings in petrol/time.

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.