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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!"
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
Telecom New Zealand have also said he wasn't their biggest text sender (It's just that his was a protest).
During the promotion people in the same room have been texting back and forth to each other about the program they've been watching, so the numbers added up. His protest was in texting the competitor service it was costing Telecom a lot more than Telecom to Telecom texts.
*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
In New Zealand, text messages are normally 20 cents to send, wheras phone calls are around $1 - $2 per min. Text messaging is very popular in NZ as a result.
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
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?"
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
What do other countries such as Asia, Europe and America pay?
I'm spanish, but I'm living in Tokyo.
I don't know about other asian countries, but at least here in Japan nobody uses SMS. Instead, we use email.
Each phone has a default email address associated to it (usually something like @phonecompany.tld), and you can change this email address whenever you want. Many people choose really hard-to-guess addresses to avoid spam. And yes, this is "normal" email, reachable from the Internet. For example, my server monitoring scripts can notify my phone of a problem by just doing a "cat $MESSAGE | mail @docomo.ne.jp".
The prices depend on the company and the type of contract. In DoCoMo phones using i-mode, one packet of data is 128 bytes. Each monthly plan includes 400 free packets. After these free packets, the next 10000 packets are billed at 0.3 yen each, and each additional packet after these 10000 is billed at 0.2 yen each. (source here).
An email message on these phones can be up to 512 characters long, so including the overhead, the maximum you will pay for a single message will be 4.5 yen.
At today's rate, 1 Japanese Yen = 0.009004 US Dollar.
My site
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.
Depends on where you are, I guess.
Based on what I see on the days that I have to take the train to work, here in Tokyo I'd say 33/day is nowhere near enough. People are messaging all the time; to see a young lady do five or six messages in the 20 minutes that it takes me to get to Shinjuku is not at all uncommon.
I on the other hand have sent about 30, at the most, in the last year.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Well, also as a new zealander i can say this.. the contract stated that it was a limited time offer, with a one month notification of cancellation clause. Anyone who feels ripped off about a deal that actually states that it can be canned at any time is an idiot. As for however many thousand messages, they were free, well, as in $10 down free, because he was still within the month that was the 'notice' period. He probably had one of those nokia phones that allows you to send messages to everyone on your directory at once. Pointless protest.. what he is really saying is "im too stupid to read a contract and now i feel victimized." This happens all the time here, as we tend to breed morons on a regular basis, and we really only have two major providers, Vodafone, and the loval version of telecom.
The issues is that they DID advertize flat rate unlimited messaging in order to grab customers, and many customers had to spend $300 and get a new phone number to make that switch.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I think this entire 'unlimited' offering is silly..
We're talking SMS messaging here. When you can get phones with internet access and support for msn / yahoo / aim-icq you tend to expect it's all covered in your monthly fee, because it is. Unless you would have me believe it's more costly to offer SMS messaging rather then yahoo over mobile.
10,000 text messages a day is nothing like 20gig a day on an ISP. assuming your average message is 128 bytes this is 1.25MB a day. At 110 baud a reasonable typing speed this would be all day. At 2400 baud that's like an hour of use, at phone speeds this is squat. 20gigs a day on an ISP for your average joe cable user would be all day use. Filling up a hard drive in a matter of days is excessive, but typing speeds are not likely to max out network speeds that are measured in KB/sec.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Ambiguous limits and shady enforcement policies foster a sense of unease among users.
Yeah, and it's always good to have your customers uneasy about using your service.
When I owned an R/C track I offered unlimited practice for three bucks a driver a day. I told people flat out that they could show up at opening with the wife and kiddies bearing a picnic basket and stay until closing for their three bucks.
And some people did, and it was a real pain in the ass because I wasn't the sort to just take their money and sit behind the counter ignoring them all day. I considered my customers my guests and treated them as such, making sure music they liked was playing, the sort of racing tapes they liked were on the TV, helped them set up their cars and even played with their kids so that they'd be free to play with their cars.
That's a lot of work for three bucks.
But I didn't consider these people as abusing my policy. I set my policy. My policy was my policy.
And I had a lot of happy customers who loved coming to my place and hanging out, who felt free to just pop in for a few minutes or a few hours. Who never felt they had to carefully schedule their visits so they came more often.
So I had more customers overall, because they were all happy.
KFG
Vodaphone in Egypt does SMS for LE.50 which is about US$.08 or EU$.066 on their worst plan.
The cost to send the messages is on the order of a thousand of a cent. The rest is all nice profit or intercarrier fees.
If you send a lot of messages, you can buy a microcell for about US$6000 new ($1000 used) and relay them yourself. Of course someone might get a bit annoyed if you used a frequency you don't have the rights too but that migth not too expensive to buy for a small area.
It was on the news here. He was sending the same message to all the users in his addressbook with the send to all function of his phone. So if you have a hundred ppl listed it can add up pretty quick.
It's not said in that short article, but I'm pretty sure it's the same guy that I read about a week or so ago. And he was sending the bulk of the SMS's to a spare SIM card that he had, so that he wouldn't annoy all his friends. Small mercies I suppose.
--- There isn't any problem that can't be solved by a small, low yield nuclear device, is there??
You are completely right. "Unlimit" is always within some limits, as every company who actually pays something to a provider upstream to offer this service would be on the slippery slope to extinction , if they wouldn't care how much you use the "unlimited" service.
Unlimited is a marketing ploy, nothing more and nothing less.
Point in case, a DSL provider in Germany offers a no-transfer-limit DSL account. I have just read that they regularly (every month or so) identify those users who pull more than 20GB per month, and send them a polite letter, offering them 100 Euros (100-something US$), if they terminate their account at once. Moreover, they can keep the DSL router and other hardware they got for free when signing up. Basically, they're saying, we don't want you, here's some cash if you leave right away (and sign a statement that you won't re-apply for their service if you keep up your downloading habits).
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.
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SMS has got to be the most ridiculous message format I've ever seen! Only telcos could come up with a standard that bad.
It was newer mean to be an instant-messaging protocol. SMS is built on top of the simple debugging messages that the GSM standard allows. Some engineers at Nokia started playing around with the idea and didn't bother to design a real solution.
I don't know if age factors in to it. I'm 22 years old and refuse to use phones as much as possible(within reason[cell and otherwise]). I think they are rude, impersonal and obtrusive. If I want to speak to someone I'll do it face to face.
I do have both a personal landline and cell phone. The cell phone stays off unless I must make a call. The landline doesn't get answered unless I'm expecting a call or the caller-id is someone I want to talk to.
I hold a similar philosophy about instant messengers. I always have AIM running at home on away status and at work I have IBM Sametime. Sametime is pretty unused unless I'm wasting time while looking busy[during the worst time of the week - 3-5pm on Fridays] or need to check with someone who's on a long duration phone call.
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.