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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!"
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.
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
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