Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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
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).