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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!"
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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.
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.
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???
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.
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.
... 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.
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".
My phone has the ability to store messages... the article says he sent the same message repeatedly. It's a matter of two clicks on my phone to bring up the stored text message and send it. Rinse and repeat.
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
Text messages are less intrusive, people can answer them when they have the time. I don't like having people call regarding things which basicly isn't that important, seen me a text message and I can answer you when I have the time.
I don't call people if I can avoid it, I think it's very rude to assume that they will have the time to talk to me. Emails and text messages a is something they can deal with later. For important things or situations where you need the answer right now, sure a phone call it better.
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?"
Uh - no bill. His protest was in the last month of the text deal that Telecom NZ had, so it was all their loss, not his. He still got charged the same total as the previous months.
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"
And then there is the possibility to send text messages from a computer in a variety of ways, including connecting your mobile to it.. A computer can also generate and send messages and a quite incredible rate..
Its easy, he simply built a beowulf cluster of thumbs.
/ducks
Thanks, Mr A.C., for injecting a little local perspective! While I'm not a Telecom NZ subscriber, allow me to explain a little more...
The two main phone networks in NZ are Vodafone and Telecom. Vodafone initially dominated the texting market, with 20c-per-text prices using its GSM network. In order to reclaim some marketshare, Telecom introduced its "$10-per-month for unlimited texting deal" last year, and advertised it nationwide.
Here's the kicker. Telecom's network is based on CDMA, and to switch from Vodafone to Telecom you have to purchase a new phone and get a new phone number. Lots of people I know were spending hundreds of dollars a month on text charges with Vodafone, so justifying the expense of ~$300NZD for a midrange Telecom phone and switching over made sense economically.
During this period, I don't recall Telecom mentioning any time limit on the deal whatsoever. Anyone who paid more attention than I to the extremely small print at the bottom of their TV screens can feel free to post a rebuttal, but many people received an assurance from Telecom store clerks in person that the $10 deal was guaranteed for a long time (years to decades) and correspondingly switched over to the Telecom network, expecting their initial outlay for a new phone to eventually pay for itself.
Fast forward to 2004, and Telecom pulls the bait and switch on its subscribers, causing a lot of them to get very angry and send as many text messages as they could before the $10 deal terminated as a protest.
I can see where Telecom is coming from, as they do pay interconnect agreements with Vodafone and have to pay approximately 8c to 14c (can't recall the exact figure) per text message that terminates on Vodafone's network, and as such the $10 deal is uneconomic in the long term. And they do still have a monthly deal, but it's capped at ~500 messages last I heard, which is less than many people require (especially when forwarding one message to several people; it adds up rapidly!). However, I still feel that Telecom's behaviour with regards to advertising their phone deal was a little unethical, and I can see exactly where the person in the article is coming from...
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I'm a long time Vodafone subscriber (switched _from_ telecom before their $10 text deal) and am incredibly happy with the service Vodafone provides.
Now when Telecom announced their $10/month for unlimited text almost everyone I knew could see into the (near) future that Telecom was going to pull the old "bait and switch" with this whole deal.
I would constantly put the sales reps that accosted me at my University on the spot by asking in a loud voice when the deal will end. They said "indefinate" while umming and ahhhing which then I would say "So, you could change it next month, right?".
Now while this "unlimited" texting went on, people started to wonder how Telecom could afford this kind of madness, but Telecom in New Zealand controls a huge majority of Phone lines, toll calls, ADSL connections and controls one of the largest ISP's in NZ (Xtra). We knew where they were getting their money from they were subsidising their losses in the cell phone division from their other (more profitable) departments.
So as more and more people started to poke their nose into Telecom's business, we knew their next move was coming next. $10/month for 500 texts. Now the deal is still a huge savings in money, but it's just the fact that Telecom changed the rules while the game was being played and that upset a lot of people.
Vodafone cannot compete with those prices, so Vodafone chose to start pushing their interactive GPRS technologies such as Vodafone Live! (neat wap portal) and PXT (picture messages). Now even though I could save $50/month I simply do not trust telecom! I'm an account holder with Vodafone (not prepay) and I just will not deal with Telecom more than I have to, lest they choose to rip me off.
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.
From the perspective of another New Zealander, I doubt the following statement, "Lots of people I know were spending hundreds of dollars a month on text charges with Vodafone"...
The voice mobile service in NZ is more expensive than most developed country. Here links to the most generous plan from Vodafone that is the major rival against Telecom. It is something like NZD$40 (about US$25) for 300 min of offpeak min. $1/min on peak hours... Forget about the daytime plans... They are 5 times more expansive. Since voice service is so expensive, most secondary and university students rely on text message for communication... Many of them are on prepaid as they cannot afford the monthly fee.
Here comes to the point: many of them found $40 expensive, do they have the few hundred buck for texting? Students in general don't earn much. Some university students receive allowance from the government at a rate of $500/month. Accomodation can easily be more than that...
IMO, the current chaos is created by the "all you can eat" mentality. I know many secondary students start sending bulk forward messages, joke etc... Before then, texting was for something more crucial like "I got stuck in the traffic", "Let's meet at xyz 7pm tonite"... It really catches Telecom off guard... We cannot exclude the possiblity that some of the texting records are broken with the aid of computers.
Telecom is the bully in the local telco market... But, in this event, I don't blame them for cutting the $10 unlimited texting deal... It is clear since the first day that the $10 deal is a limited promotion with time limit...
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.
Land lines are so much easier,
My landline phone only remembers the last number I dialed. My cell phone remembers the last 10, and has 200 more in the address book. (I can also store numbers on my landline phone, but I can't attach names to them, so I'd have to make a separate record of what number is which person... too much hassle.)
So there's lots of times when it's easier for me to pick up my cell phone to make a call, even when I'm home.
you have unlimited calls to all your friends in your area code,
I live in Los Angeles. About three of my friends are in my area code. The city itself has four different area codes.
Granted, many of those are still not toll charges, but some of them are, and I can't tell by the area code which will be. My friend in Van Nuys (818) is local, but my friend in Reseda (also 818) is a toll call.
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.
While with my cell phone, I can do the same to my friend in San Jose or my mom when she's out of town in Detroit or Nigeria, and have the same experience... because it's a very, very rare occurence for me to go over my monthly minutes.
With a cellphone, you have all these funky plans, unneeded features, and hidden costs.
My cell phone bill is the same each month, within a few cents. My landline varies more.
I have no "unneeded features." I get a package that includes the features I want and will use. I don't want text messaging, so my package doesn't include it. I do want unlimited long distance, so my package gives me that.
A second landline can be had for $15/mo, so you can have two numbers, one for you, and one for the kids.
I can add a second line to my cell phone for $9.99/month. Oh, and, that $15/month doesn't include about $5/month in taxes, surcharges, and fees you'll be paying. (Same is true of the cell phone, but since many are a percentage of what you pay, it's even cheaper by comparison.)
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.
Or, get a good cell phone plan for about $40/month, and pay nothing extra for long distance or "local toll" at all.
We cancelled long distance service on our landline, because AT&T started charging us $6/month even when we didn't use it. We never use it, because it's free from our cell phones.
So, it sounds like you're woefully underinformed about cellular service, and you're paying for your ignorance. Good on you.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?