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80,012 Text Messages In One Month
webguru4god writes "According to an article on AZCentral.com, a man in New Zealand sent an average of 2,580 text messages a day for a whole month to protest his cell phone provider cancelling their unlimited text messaging plan. I recently received a faulty cell phone bill for $2000 claiming that I sent 40,000 text messages in one month, which I thought was physically impossible. But apparently this man has doubled that number and managed to get 8 hours of sleep each night for the month!"
pay first, then complain
I think they're missing the bigger story: How did this man grow two extra thumbs to key in those 80,000 messages? ;)
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
hi2u want big penis message back plz
Well that is alot of text messages, but I wouldnt want to have that phone bill, even if it was a mistake.
I think that would make me cry... alot.
snowulf.com
I think this entire 'unlimited' offering is silly...it seems we're seeing more and more cases of some group of customers that basically exceed whatever the company expects the realistic extreme to be, and the company simply creates a cap. An ISP might offer unlimited bandwidth, the the minute a few people start managing to pull down 20gig a day, or say, a phone company customer base starts sending 10,000 text messages a day, we start seeing things like this. We know there's a reasonable extreme to be expected in any service like this, and it'd be nice of the companies responsbile just gave a good limit (1 gig of free e-mail, anyone?) that most people won't get close to hitting, but is big enough to keep users coming in.
I know nothing
God damnit, why the hell did you have to go off-topic? Wrong thread dumbass.
Anyways, text messaging rules. Don't pay, f'em!
Little over a year ago, there was an MMS war between the telcos here in Norway and all MMS messages were free of charge. The price war continued for half a year and I save a lot on using MMS to send text instead of SMS.
so his plan was that by showing them that more messages were sent when the company charged for them , somehow this company would decide against the extra income and return to free text messages. Hmmm, well we can't all be geniuses.
You can send tons of text messages with programs like this
And with sites like CellularOneWest you can send up to 12 at a time.
Considering the cost increase he'd probably be paying for the charged messages, the costs for carpal tunnel surgery will likely outweigh any savings he would have had if his campaign had worked.
...that falls into the 'genetic-cul-de-sac' category of mental development. What an utterly insipid "protest".
The cap doesn't seem that unreasonable as it is probably protecting other text messaging users from spam.
According to the article, some users were sending 100,000 messages per month. This is the equivalent of 3,333 messages per day. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of legitimate uses for this many messages except for commercial dispatch (for example) but in those instances, those companies should be expected to pay. I mean, as a messaging user, I sure don't want to subsidize a dispatch company for their commercial usage of the feature.
Perhaps the limit is a little too low but I personally don't see many people using an average of more than 33 messages per day. Note this is average and not, for example, one bad day with the server going up and down all the time.
Sunny
Be my Friend
What i've always wondered on my plan, is why text messaging costs more than phoning. I'm on pay and talk at the moment, while phoning costs like 5 cents per minute, and texting costs 15 cents per message. It's crazy! Texting takes longer to type, you can only get like 140 CHARACTERS per message, and yet it costs 3 times more! I dont know, but texting should be like internet, you pay a certain fee per month, and you get unlimited messaging. What cost for bandwidth does a little bit of words cost???
He was sending about 2 1/2 messages a minute for 16 hours a day! He must have been using a data cable and a program to send all those messages. I know I would have gone completely loopy sending the same message 2,500 times a day.
Patriotism is the opium of the masses
I guess that after spamming his own friends nobody wants to be his friend so why would he need an unlimited msg account?
It was on the news here. He was sending the same message to all the users in his addressbook with the send to all function of his phone. So if you have a hundred ppl listed it can add up pretty quick.
Only 80,012 msgs...you little puss! You didnt even make the 100,000 msg mark.
Telecom spokeswoman Helen Isbister said a handful of people had sent more than 100,000 text messages in May.
At that time, some phones were even only capable off recieving them (or just resetted if you sent "large" SMS with 160 chars).
So try to calculate how much 1 MB of transfer it costs with texting. GPRS is a little bit cheaper (at least in Europe) and UMTS will cut some costs as well. Problem is that you can not send direct messages as all the data connections get private IPs within their networks (and they firewall a bit)
"You can only take my money for so long before you take it all and I say enough!"
... which he believed would be in force until 2010.
Speaking as a New Zealander, I find it ridiculous that anyone could believe that Telecom's "$10 Text" promotion would last for several more years. When the promotion began, it was very clearly advertised that the promotion would only extend to the end of 2003. I think that Telecom's customers have been lucky that they have extended the promotion for an extra 6 months.
To put it quite simply: Telecom New Zealand advertised it as a time-limited promotion. People who believe that it should continue indefinitely are confused, and believe that they should get something for nothing.
*looks at $500 cell phone bill* and I thought my 1200 a month was bad.... although I also was pissed when they cut my unlimited to 500 a month
On some models of phones, you can treat it as a GSM modem and send SMS through the computer. Otherwise, you cen get a GSM modem which does the trick.
http://www.isis.de/~s.frings/smstools_index.html
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
it'd be pretty easy. Plus with msn you can SMS messages to someone who isn't logged in. The receiver pays for it. It'd be _very_ easy to send the same thing copy and pasted to yourself.
That f00l is stupid as so is this post :\
the article said:
"His text attack was simple enough - he repeatedly sent friends a message reading: 'Hi. How are you?'"
it should have read:
"His text attack was simple enough - he repeatedly sent his former friends a message reading: 'Hi. How are you?'"
In Australia we pay an average of 20c to 25c per SMS message.
Considering how little data is traversed to wager the cost, I can't see how its anywhere near reasonable.
Our postal service will physically send a letter to anywhere in Australia for 40c - which requires much more signficant investment in resources. And yet somehow telcos feel they can charge -that- much.
Whenever I can, I prefer to pick up the mobile to call somebody, if you stay on the phone for no longer than 30 seconds its about the same cost. And the call is calcuated per second airtime.
What do other countries such as Asia, Europe and America pay?
Tell us!
For 100,000 messages that accounts to NZ$8000 per month. The Telecom deal was $10 per month so they would lose $7990 per month for a customer that texted that much to Vodafone!!
Telecom didn't think this out before they offered the deal, have lost shitloads of money, and are now backtracking furiously and blaming "spammers".
Powerbook+bluetooth enabled phone+some scripting. Should be fairly easy. The real question is whether the man has any friends left after one month of unlimited text-terror. Anybody doing that to me would have to get their phone surgically removed from where the sun doesnt shine. Either that or buy me a huge amount of strawberry daiquiris.
I suppose he must have had a lot of people in his phone book, but still that's a lot of messages to recieve. I have roughly 100 #'s in my phone book and a lot of those aren't cell numbers. In fact probably less than half are. Even if he had 100 cell #'s, you're still looking to get 25-26 messages a day from him. I'd have found some way to block his messages after about the 3rd message. Besides that, it costs me money to recieve text messages. A lot less than to send them, but it still costs. I wouldn't want to be footing the bill for his protest.
It's a PHONE, how about you just call the person instead? It seems so pointless to waste you time thumbing in silly little messages that people can barely understand instead of just punching in their phone number and saying what you need to say.
Buckethead
The article says 'he repeatedly sent friends a message reading: "Hi. How are you?"'
2,580 times a day he did this. I am guessing he is now short a few friends...
#DeleteChrome
Land lines are so much easier, you have unlimited calls to all your friends in your area code, and you can sit and chat with them all day like it is nothing if you want, because it isn't going to cost you a dime more or less todo so. With a cellphone, you have all these funky plans, unneeded features, and hidden costs. A second landline can be had for $15/mo, so you can have two numbers, one for you, and one for the kids. All for about $35/mo, and you don't have to worry about "going over". If you have family in another state, just get a calling card, or get a good long distance plan.
Sig: I stole this sig.
How did this guy manage this? Is he a mutated nerd like us who have grown extra fingers due to the radition from our constant computer use? Damn I should've never got that plastic case....
Have you metaroderated recently?
(Then again he could have an amazingly active social life with that many texts!)
i send them via Apple Address Book -- the cellphone is connected via Bluetooth. Much more covenient, and those 80.000 messages seem perfectly possible :-)
i bet my friends sometime wonder how i can reply with texts with elaborate grammar seconds after they text me...
I have an app that sends about 140 messages to customers every day and it takes about 10 minutes to do that. In couple of days you could easily send that amount of text messages.
I'm trying to figure out the effectiveness of this protest. The message he sent is 16 bytes. I'm not sure how big SMS headers are but lets assume about 30 bytes. So thats 46 bytes per message. Times 80,012 = 3,680,552. I don't know exactly how much bandwidth etc is allocated for text messaging within a cellular telephone carrier, but three and a half megabytes in a month doesn't seem like much. Lets look at average traffic. The article states that he slept 8 hours per night over what appears to be a 31 day period. That would mean he is awake 16 hours per day. 2,580 messages over 16 hours is 161.25 messages per hour, 2.6875 messages per minute, or ~.045 messages per second. 46 bytes x .045 means he is only sending an average of 2.07 bytes per second. Pretty small beans. It would have been just as easy to send a 160 character message 80,012 times as it was to send his short one. Perhaps something like DoS was not his aim, but the article states that this was an "attack." I don't know too many people that need in the tens of thousands text messages per month that can't afford to pay more than $6.29/mo. Despite all this, I do believe that companies should hold true to their claims or offerings. I doubt that Mr. Ray's 2.07 bytes per second made them LOSE any money, but as seen in the article they sure could have made a shitload off of it. If a company is going to offer something like that, they should be prepared for power users taking full advantage of it.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
So the real news is that New Zealanders need something to occupy their time.
3 SMS messages per minute doesn't sound like much. Assuming he didn't change the message each time, after the initial time spent writing the message, its easy to send 10 to 15 per minute to numbers in the phone's address book.
I have clients who run SMS gateway machines, and each phone can send 30 to 50 messages per minute. Of course, this is computer controlled, and they have a chassis with 30 phones and hundreds of SIM cards to spread the charge across many "1000 free texts per month" plans.
Back when SMS messaging was free in Europe, I wrote a crude implementation of IP over SMS. The phones were connected with serial cables to linux boxes. It took some serious tweaking of MTU, TCP timeouts, and a couple of hacked applications (sendmail and telnet) to deal with the bandwidth, latency and small packet size problems. I even managed to perform an NFS mount over SMS. But alas, once the phone companies smelled money, it was all over.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I think he misunderstood the word "protest". To me it seems like he just proved the telecoms point.
I don't feel sorry for him that he can't continue to send a text message every 20 seconds. If it was me he was sending his "hi, how are you" drivel to, my response would probably be something in the line of "Shut the f*ck up dude"
So lets see. The provider recognizes that people are abusing the system. The guy sends thousands of pages to his friends to prove people are abusing the system, and he makes the news as being the good guy because telco's are evil??
If someone started sending *ME* thousands of messages per month, I'd get a bit irate. I suppose his friends aren't exactly happy with a month of their phone beeping at them constantly. I get a bit pissed at just our server pages (sent to my phone), and those don't count up anywhere near thousands per month.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The best is - how do you know how much it costs?
Shouldn't there be some kind of "response" or information service in line where you can request costs for a particular service? "Cost for calling ?" - "99c the first minute, 5c each 10seconds following" or somesuch.
1000/30 = 33 texts a day. For personal use, is it enough? Most people I know don't come near that many.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
I thought this was fark instead of slashdot!
The specs to which GSM phones are implemented list a number of AT commands to allow you to send an SMS among other things. With a bit of scripting, it should be easy to automate the sending of SMS's repeatedly, should you want to!
Info here.
-- Mike
... of sms'es..
1. Take your phone. Make a distribution-list which includes everyone on your phone capable to recive textmessages. (say 100 people)
2. Write a large sms. As you might know, one sms can contain 160 chars. So when you type a sms over 160 chars, it will be seen as two sms. Write one big sms (that really count as four).
3. Send this one to the distribution list: You have know sent 400 sms in just a few minutes.
4. To be sure they all got it, resend it!
5. Reply to everyone that answers, and resend again to they who don't anser!
It might just take you three minutes to send almost 1000 smses. Good luck!
When a well known UK telephone company first created a business line unlimited calls option in the early 1990's for around 400GBP per month someone worked out a clever and legal (at the time!) money making scheme. What this person did was to setup 2 phonelines:
- Line A - a premium rate number as the operator
- Line B - a business line with unlimited calls option
They then setup line B (unlimited calls) to call line A (premium rate) continuously so that half the profit of the calls to the premium rate line would go to them!!!After several days the telephone company stopped this person's profit making scheme by blocking the ability to dial premium rate calls from their unlimited service and changing the service contract but not before the telephone company had ended up paying a lot of money to someone for their clever scheme.
He's probably still paying it off...
1) Whoa! 80,012 text messages? That guy must have some kind of genetic mutant powers!
1.a) dude u could just write a prog to do that on ur linux box
2) OMG if someone did that to me I'd fuckin' kick their ass!
3) Why would someone waste their time doing this? The phone company won't care!
4) I hate text messages! None of you should ever use them!
you could try this strange brew, that's good for you. & freely distributable too.
From the copy of the NISC (Network Interconnection Service Contract) I have:
Subject to clauses 4.2 to 4.4, the price of the Text Message Service to be provided under this Agreement, and which the Originating Party agrees to pay, is 14.0 cents for each Chargeable Text Message.
From the Voice NISC:
Chargeable Call Rate: Peak - 2.9c Off Peak 0.9c.
Go figure...
The Mothership
Following is a link to an article in New Zealand's major daily on the company itself - may they rot in hell. Anti-competitive personified.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID =3570468
The Mothership
1) Not sure where you are, but in most places it's 160 chars/msg.
2) Almost all providers charge a "termination cost" per message entering their network (UK providers charge 3p per terminated message). Unlimited deals rely on the fact that most text messages generate a response, thus bringing that revenue back.
I was born using carrier pigeons and I'll die using carrier pigeons.
But what about the poor sheep! He would probaably been busy all day and still managed eight hours sleep, but what time did that leave for all the sheep shagging? Poor neglected sheep.
Can you hear me now? Good! Good! Immona Live Forever!
It's New Zealand. Unlike 'old' Zealand (where I live), the New one is full of nature's freaks. Twelve-toed snakes and five-thumbed humans and whatnot.
Here on 'old' Zealand we just have freaks of society...
I once used this to exact revenge against my ex-wife. We were still married at the time, headed for divorce when she took off to Vegas, by car, with her boyfriend for a weekend of sport fscking, I'm sure.
I was obviously pissed as I knew she was going somewhere, and suspected it would be with her 'boyfriend' so I paged her, but she never returned my call.
What I did then was setup Telex (BBS Software) on my PC to dial her pager number, wait for 2 seconds, then enter my cell phone number and hang up, repeated ad infinum. It took a total of 8 seconds for each paging cycle. I knew she was leaving pager range but what did I care.
I was sending out 450 pages per hour, starting on a Friday afternoon. I stopped paging once she returned to town that Monday. I paged her no fewer than 32,400 times that weekend. What I did was a denial of service attack on her pager where she was charged 10 cents for each page over 1000 per month.
My satisfaction grew once I heard that she received a $3,200 pager bill for that month, which she never paid and I'm sure is still on her credit report.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Free healthcare is a load of crap. Any right-thinking person would already know that.
It's a bigger scam than that. 80K messages at 160 characters only works out to 12MB.
If it's 40 characters on average that's only 3MB.
How much are most telco's charging for SMS?
Talk about profiteering.
Compare with 9600bps voice = about 70KB/minute. 170 minutes of talk time = 12MB.
42 minutes of talk time = 3MB.
(OK not full duplex - but hey they don't have to transmit silent pauses - and I'm not even sure they always support full duplex voice).
Futhermore text messages can be delayed by the telco till when its convenient/cheaper to send - fill out the unused bandwidth.
In some countries (e.g. Philippines) text messaging is free.
The interconnectivity-fee is US$ 0.04 (ca.), and I pay less per message.
We also have a provider that offers the same service as a part of one of their subscriptions (charged at about US$ 25 a month). On the minus side, they have one of the most expensive minuterates, almost twice mine.
I pay 80 øre (approx. 12 cent) per minute for phoning with the cell-phone, and 20 øre (approx. 3 cents) per text message. And no subscription fee.
But it is not really the price that matters. I send an SMS if the message is not important enough to interrupt the other person for.
No one likes telecom. The people that work there hate there jobs and the company they work for. The only reason they still exist is because they control 95% of the phone lines. Telecom went around and rang up everyone who is with vodaphone and asked there cusomters to switch and said they will give them unlimited text messaging. Its a big move to switch providers as you have to buy a new phone. No one feels sorry for telecom. The world would be better if there monopoly was broken. This is just pay back to a company that has treated its customers and employees like shit.
I think what he was trying to proove was that it costs the phone company pretty much nothing to route a text message, which is a stupid protest because the phone company probably didnt even feel it and is laughing over the morning newspaper. On my phone it costs between about 5p and 10p which is still a rip-off, but what really pisses me off more than anything, is the priority at which sms traffic gets given, sometimes it can get lost for several hours and you have to think HOW FUCKING HARD IS IT TO ROUTE 160 BYTES?!? I swear the leaching phone companies use the internet for some of it, especially if it goes over-seas which pisses me off even more - you put something that will fit into a single packet through a free network and then charge nearly a dollar?!? yes i know they are just trying to make money, but the point is, and i think that guy is with me here, WE are the union of phone users and if we all push our weight and say to the phone companies FUCK YOU then we can get what we want and they can be are bitch slaves. Ok or they could just make it much cheaper, why do we put up with this? this has to be the most poor yet most widely used mobile service in the world and yet we take all its bullshit? 160 characters! thats all you get in this day and age!? This is their little money cow, rip the customers off and they will stand for it because no-one is organised enough to mass protest it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
RTFA! It says he texted WHILE the free text period was still active, not after...I object, because you poke fun at him for something he hasn't done!
Borrow a friend's phone. Preferably one with a large memory.
Write one message. Send it to that phone. Repeat.
When the other phone's memory is full, erase the messages.
Caffeinate. Repeat.
This Like That - fun with words!
You know, if you keep sending "Hi. How are you?" to everyone you see, eventually you'll make a few new friends. Some of them might even be beautiful women.
Falls short of the fact that there are now two news articles about it, versus the zero that I'd wager at least one other irate (former?) customer must also be trying to generate.
I thimk you mispelled the word, "spam".
This seems like a stupid way to protest. I'm going to protest Dairy Queen not offering free unlimited ice cream!! Everybody meet me there to buy an ice cream!!
I guess this guy's business plan is:
1. Buy lots of company A's product while, at the same time, protesting it.
2. ???
3. Profit!
That must be some of that "new economy" stuff.
If you compare the bandwith needed for am SMS with the band width needed for a phonecall, you will notice that SMS'es are (usually) fairly overpriced. In other words the SMSing teens pay part of the phone bill for the rest of us.
Once the market settles these prices will change. The price of an SMS will go down, and the price of a mobile phone conversation will go up. Anyway agree with you that free SMS is somewhat silly.
...EOM...
IANAL, especially not a New Zealand lawyer, but at least by US standards, this is false advertising.
Look at the details of the plan that they advertise.
Text Messaging $0.20 - But you'll pay no more than $10 a month
There is no fine print. There is nothing to lead me to believe that I cannot send 100,000 text messages for $10.
--
The last 12 messages must have been the most gratifying.
He managed to prove their point of why they have to resend the "unlmited offer"..
Im all for protest to make a statement when you are getting screwed, but come on, use a bit of common sence when you do it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you had any social life at all you would know that clubs and parties are noisy and there are some conversations that you do not want overheard.
[sarcasm] Wow, what an accomplishment. He must have a life too. [/sarcasm]
...as long as the price is right. Maybe ten wasn't enough, but it appears to me that it's Telecom's responsibility to leave themself a large buffer in their projections, then dropping the price if feasible.
Hell, it beats the US. You can buy a 500 msg plan for ~$8, sure, but what if you don't use that much? If I send a msg from my Cell One phone to my mom's Verizon phone, I get charged a dime to send and she a dime to recieve. But if she sends and I receive, it's free for both of us. Why?
But then again, text messaging isn't as widespread in the US. Personally, I'm waiting on phones that have reasonably working IM. They exist, but not around here. I have DSL, so whip up a gateway (not too hard, really, using Trillian) and you're good to go.
Imagine getting the "Hi How are you" message every few minutes for a month. It would drive me insane!
It's ridiculous what it costs, especially when you consider the demands on the network relative to a voice call are near zero.
Can you hear me now?...
Good!!!
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
which I thought was physically impossible.
It's called "software". You can't see it, but it runs on the big heater-thing you have in the corner, the one hooked up to that weird TV on the desk.
I know I could link up palm pilot to my cellular via infrared and send SMS directly from the PDA. That was 8 years ago.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
When I got a cell phone recently I was asked for some very personal info such as social security number, drivers license number, date of birth. When I asked why they claimed it was so they could "find" me if I charged up a big phone bill and then refused to pay. I didn't think they needed to start a dossier on me so I asked several of these phone service providers if I could get my account capped at some low amount. I even offered to leave a deposit for this amount. They said they won't do that. I am still mystified as to why. Credit card companies will do it. They will even question charges that appear fraudulent. But a telecomm company won't?
I ended up getting one of them to agree to remove my social security number from there computer file by zeroing it out after performing a credit check. I suspect it is still in their computer though. Does anyone know why a phone company would actually need your most personal information?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
What a great protest!!!
Any one remember the American Idol deal where a Hawaii girl won a round, and alot of people woundered how she did it?... well I think we know how...
How many of the messages were FP comments on /.?
-Mikey P
I was there too - during the Night of the Long Anal Knives. I still hope Hiter's corpse will rise from the grave and bugger me senseless while I'm blowing a German Shepard. Oh - Happy D-Day!
PS - The French are cowards and always will be.
I've never figured out why text messaging is so _expensive_ on cellphones.
Consider that voice minutes are built into my calling plan (in the US). If I use all my daytime minutes in one month, my cost per minute is $0.17 ($35 month/200 minutes). One second of voice data should consist of about 8kb of data (landlines, at least, I thought were 8000 samples/sec at 8 bits/sample, in some funny encoding). So one minute of voice is 480 kilobytes of data, for $0.17.
Now, my service charges...hm, it's 5 or 10 cents for a text message. Each text message is limited to about 200 bytes; if an incoming message is longer, it gets split into multiple messages. So I pay maybe 5 cents for 200 bytes...at the same data cost, a minute of voice data would cost $120/minute! Not to mention on the average phone, text messaging is a real pain to use (just a numeric keypad). I only use it when I need to email someone because they're on the phone. It seems like a text message _should_ cost about $0.00007 (480,000 bytes/200 bytes * $0.17/minute for voice) based on the amount of data sent relative to voice calls.
It just seems like it'd be in the phone company's favor to have free messaging. Text messaging has got to put less of a load on the system than voice(can support more users at a time for the same infrastructure); every message sent replaces the need to handle a (relatively expensive) call.
Or so some companies would have you believe. About 6 years ago, when broadband was starting to sprout up, we still had dial-up. We used Bellsouth dial-up a lot, after all it was "unlimited access".One day Bellsouth notified us and said we were abusing the unlimited access. We also had netzero (free then), and the irony was that Netzero had better connection speeds than Bellsouth.
...that perhaps his phone is hooked up to a PC and sending them automatically?
I sometimes think that all these SMS incidents including people who claim to sms 2000 times a day to competitions that they have access to an SMS gateway or something.
Reminds of the time my mate wrote a BASIC program to print out his "lines" that he was given as discipline. Back then the teachers thought he had typed it all up but all it was:
Imagine a government agency receives backlash for proposing to database everyone, and is "forced" to drop this proposal. Instead, they make it financially attractive for private companies to do the data collection for them, by buying the database.
Not so hard to imagine, is it?
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This is old stuff tho, i read it like a month ago. :) But it would been better if he wrote an java application or something for sending the messages instead of putting all this work in it. :)
100 Mbps???
I am glowing green like chernobyl with jealousy.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I sure hope his carrier does not have any abuse clauses in his ToS! A couple of US carriers are cracking down on these types who are abusing "unlimited" services just to abuse them.
I had my kiosks setup to send out a text message to my cellphone.
28 computers
sending 1 message an hour (24 hours)
+ 1 message each time a computer is used
+ 1 message after each reboot (reboots every 3 users)
+ 1 if a bill validator is jammed.
+1 at 4am giving a status report of the machine rebooting (set to reboot at least once a day)
This equals about 800 messages a day. I tried this for a week (about 5600 text messages) and had to just have them sent to an email address, I couldnt handle going through the mail box steps 60+ times a hour.
TruePunk | Games
Mate, just wait until it becomes deregulated (govt rules removed and industry governs itself) and privatised (public assett sold to private company) like it is here in Australia. I've stopped using mobile phones because the costs just keep going up and up and up, the plans are mean and tricky and the salespeople generally don't have a clue, especially about their own terms and conditions.
I now enjoy uninterrupted leisure time like I used to in the 70/80's (minus the Atari 2600). If I don't want to receive calls I leave the house or use Caller ID (now thats useful technology) to screen out time stealers.
If I need to talk to someone while I'm out I use a payphone or, brace yourself kiddies, I wait until I get home to call. Yes seriously, I WAIT!!! OMG!!! It's that thing you used to do before you got broadband. You know, that thing you do while Mommy makes your breakfast.
-- Howto: Get +5 (1) Whine about M$ (2) Namedrop Gentoo (3) Casually Abuse Mods (4) Namedrop Early Computer Model
Depends where you live, but many cellphone networks have extortionate charges for placing cross-network calls. When I was in the UK i had to pay 45p (80c) per minute to call a different network off peak - more during the day. Versus around 1p (2c) a minute to call a land line or another customer on the same network.
:)
Personally i had a calling card service, so i could pay landline rates + calling card cellphone rates... but most people weren't that committed.
Text messaging is a far cheaper way to have the same conversation, plus it's far less invasive than actually calling.
It's been with us since networks went digital in the early 90s - it's no fad
Now video messaging - that's a fad.