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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 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
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.
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???
Sure, you might say that I'm abusing the system, but hey, I signed up for unlimited text messages, so that's what I expected to get. If they didn't want it to be unlimited why didn't they just say '500 free messages a day' or something.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
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
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.
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"
He's probably still paying it off...
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
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.
IMO, the current chaos is created by the "all you can eat" mentality.
Which is wrong... exactly why?
Anyone offering flat rate, unlimited-for-fixed-price (all you can eat) takes on a risk. This is obvious for anyone with basic understanding of economy. The same happened with unlimited internet access - marketing made assumptions about usage patterns that turned out wrong.
However in this case it may be simpler, as it seems somewhat to be bait and switch thing. Honest limited time offers say they are limited.
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
Don't most agreements with service companies include verbage like "conditions are subject to change [with|without] notice.."? In addition to often disclaiming that they aren't to blame if they don't actually provide adequate service or reliability. Agreements that are subject to change are fairly useless and all too common. But, we accept them.
I can't imagine why your wife would rather be with another man than with you. You sound like a total dreamboat.
Putting myself in her position, it might have been worth the $3,200 to receive absolute assurance that she was making the right decision.
Posted anonymously, lest you decide to take revenge against me too.