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SMS Text Messaging & Youth Debt One
securitas writes "The New York Times' Lisa W. Foderaro reports on the impact of SMS text messaging and resulting debt on America's youth. The predictable but seldom-considered effect of the recently available technology combined with the social role instant messaging and SMS play are leading to bills that youth and parents alike can't afford. 'Many high school and college students accustomed to sending unlimited instant messages on their computers do not adapt easily to text messaging's pay-per-message format, and end up with unexpectedly high bills' ranging from $300 to $800 per month. One school principal says that 'many students were blindsided by costs associated with text-messaging and other features, like customized ring tones"
In the Philippines we've (kinda) solved this problem by having prepaid SIM cards. They make up the bulk of accounts in my country seeming most of population can only pay on a staggered/installment basis. Maybe America's youth should do the same.
Wah, wah, wah.
You could say the same thing for cell phones in general.
I had to "work-off" my long distance phone bills in the BBS days...
You set the limits as a parent... and if the kid goes over it, he/she pays.
It's called growing up.
Commercial services may cost money!
Shock horror.
Pay as you go phones. Pay for the credit upfront, and when it's used up, you stop until you can buy more from your pocket money.
no taxation without representation!
People make stupid financial decisions! Story at 11!
There's really no excuse for this kind of thing except sheer stupidity. I know that Sprint allows unlimited incoming/outgoing SMS messages for $10 a month. This is really no different than a kid running up their parent's credit card a buck a shot to $400, when you get down to it.
As for me, I can't really even imagine sending and receiving 300 SMS messages a month, let alone the 3000 that these kids seem to handle with ease. Maybe I could do it with a Sidekick, but damn, not with a regular cell phone.
Stupid semi-OT question: does anyone have any experience with buying a T608 on eBay and getting Sprint to set it up to work with the network? Any experiences on how good a phone it is in general?
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Makes me think of this one: "Economic Woes and Dismal Math/Science Scores: Related Deficits?"
To be blunt, it really makes me think that most of America's youth is too stupid to know that X messages @ $0.yy ea = $lots'ocash.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
So , if understand this correctly,in the US you have to pay for sms you send and recieve,even without knowing that you wanted to recieve that message?
Do you guys also have to pay for recieving post (with a stamp)?
In Norway (and most of Europe I think), you can buy SIM cards that you need to "fill up". You buy a reg.code worth maybe $15, you call a (free) number and dial in the reg.code. You can then call/text for $15 before you need to fill up again. The reg.codes are available everywhere. It works great. If you dont have money, you cant call/text (except to 911/112).
Did that make any sense at all?
Really, $800/month to send what - at most, 10MB of data (can anyone actually enter that much data in one month using a mobile phone?) - over a wireless network is pretty pathetic.
$800 a month assuming it was all text messages (which the article says it wasn't, but still)
$.10 a message yields 8000 messages.
Per message limit of 160 according to the article (GSM is a bit higher IIRC) + Call it 40 bytes of header information 8000 * (160 + 40) = 1600000.
1024 bytes in a kilobyte. 1600000/1024 = 1562.5
1024 kb in a megabyte 1562.5/1024 = 1.53 MB
Or if you don't want to count header 1.22MB
Of course I am assuming they are using bytes and no compression. Actually Either figure would be a long novel so I doubt anywhere near that was sent. Some evil companies have a chat mode for SMS, where it looks like an IM convo and I could easily see that being mostly Hi, How are you? type stuff.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
In Europe, an SMS costs approximately 10 cts. Kids send about 10-15 messages a day. And love downloading crappy 3 ringtones. A real song costs 1. You don't need to be Einstein to realise how expensive it gets. Where's the problem?! The cost of these thingies. It has a minimal(non-existant?) cost for the operator, but they make you pay a fortune for 'em. Many associations pointed this out, but hey, it's easy money. Kids aren't to blame.
. . . with all that whine? Seriously, I can only have so much sympathy for anyone who signs a contract with the costs spelled out clearly and then is unprepared when they are expected to pay those costs.
And I believe today's User Friendly comic is apropos: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050109
get stuff free, pay only 17.99
sms costs 5 cents to send, so 17.99 gets you 360 sms from your phone and sore thumbs
in average month, that's about 12 messages per day, which is alot from my point of view, then again, I might not be the most active sms sender
apparently it's too hard for these kids to use the IM clients in phones which work over GPRS
much cheaper than sms if you have to send more than one message
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Here are the answers to most of the questions on this thread:
- Yes, most carriers charge you to receive SMS here in the U.S. If you use SMS a lot you should get unlimited SMS. It is usually an extra $10.
- Yes, you can buy prepaid SIM cards here, or have prepaid accounts. This solves the entire problem, but if mentioned it would not allow us to whine about the "corporations".
- Yes, young adults send a lot of SMS messages. Europeans send a hell of a lot more than Americans do. Vodafone says SMS+ringtones makes up 40% of their business in the EU. FORTY PERCENT. This just proves that both the EU and the USA are filled with stupid people with too much money.
- Yes, typing a message with T9 on a keypad can be tough, but people like it. It is not "better to just call them up". SMS's are silent and can be made discreetly (not discretely kiddies).
...that isn't a prepay phone? Virgin Mobile and other companies make phones that require you to buy a $20 prepaid card at your local grocery store ahead of time. This makes it easy to meter your cell phone usage and prevents this kind of insanity. Great for adults, too.
Oh, and maybe not giving them a cell at all would work, too.
Isn't this just more evidence that most people are a bit daft when it comes to money? If they're not actually paying for it there and then with cash, most people find it hard to think of it as real money.
It's just like those idiots who get the cheap introductory offers from companies like 3 and think "ooh, I'm getting a good deal" , but don't look up how much the normal monthly tariff is. It often doubles from £15 to £30 after three months or something, with a one year minimum.
While the blame lies with the kids and their parents for not reading the details of the plans they sign up for, i have a lot of sympathy for them: it's not intuitive that ringtones and SMS messages would be so expensive since they feel like things that should cost next to nothing.
In other words, when i found out i could download AIM for my phone, i initially assumed the price must be something reasonable, since as a programmer i know that an SMS message probably take up the bandwidth equivalent of a few seconds of voice call, and voice calls cost about $0.0022 cents per second.
Luckily before i started using it i found out that each IM (note: i didn't say "each IM session") costs 10 cents. Yikes!
It's sort of like a hotel mini-bar. When a naive person first comes across one, they think, "Oh, i could go for a soda. That costs about 89 cents, so i'm sure with a hotel markup, it'll be like $1.50 or $2." Then they find out the mini-bar price is $5. It's their own fault, but it's understandable since one doesn't expect such a large markup.
The question is, since we live in a land of capitalism and the cell phone market has tremendous competition, why hasn't the price of SMS messaging dropped? For that matter, why hasn't the price of mini-bar food dropped?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
This mobile phone stuff is the same kind of problem as folks who get in too deep with credit cards. It's easy to think "it's their problem and they're idiots for not recognizing that products and services co$t!" Unfortunately, the end result is often higher costs for everyone. When individuals default on loans, rates for the rest go up. The US government seems to ascribe to the culture of living beyond its means too. Usery is alive and well and sometimes awefully hard to discern.
I report to Colonel 2.6.1 and General Chaos is his boss.
Welcome to 2001... the rest of the developed world has been noticing this for several years now...
One school principal says that 'many students were blindsided by costs associated with text-messaging and other features, like customized ring tones'
Wow, what a frank admission by one Mr. Kevin Truitt that he isn't properly teaching kids to grow up in today's society. How hard is it to get a math problem reworded to make such costs more obvious? "Little Billy sends Suzie 8 eight SMS a day at 12 cents each . . ."
Receiving phone calls and sms is free of charge in Denmark. Sending sms and calling people costs money, but one can control that by not calling or sending messages. It is a problem if others can run up your phone bill just by calling/sms'ing you.
I dream to see an advert like this:
"Hello, im John Smith head of the ACME network. Do you know how much we in the mobile phone industry like to rip you off? our profit margins go as high as %100,000 and we all work together to keep it that way. But at ACME we've decided to rebel, starting today we're embarking on a vicious price war with our competitors, we'll give you a no-contract pay-as-you-go network with absolutely free SMS messages any time and any place, no matter where you go in the world they'll still be free and unlimited and right now our competitors are all having heart attacks. How do we do this and still charge your calls at reasonable prices? simple, it costs us almost nothing to route your messages and we figured we would steal 95% of our competitors customers in just one week. So fuck you Orange, T-Mobile, O2, Vodaphone, Virgin, 3, and all the others, we're just about to screw your cash cow in the arse" (does hand gesture) "SUCK IT"
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What I found the strangest thing in the article,
is that one has to pay for recieving messages.
Here in Belgium, you only have to pay for sending, mostly about 0.13 (about $0.10 or less)
It's not like you have to pay to recieve a phonecall or something, or am I mistaking?
"The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner."
Of course!!
I think the other way around is verrry strange
Imagine someone with too much money hates your guts,
they can let you pay a couple of thousands bucks
just by sending you a insane amount messages?
"The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner."
Nope, you have to pay for receiving calls too, although you have the option to not answer if you don't recognize the incoming number, although that's not as much an option with SMS. (or any of the horrible bastardizations)
From what I understand, this is quite backward from how the rest of the world does things. Land lines do have free incoming calls, but this is not the case with cellphones (mobiles)
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I think it's mostly due to historical reasons. Before there were cellular phones, there was a mobile phone service that used VHF FM radio. The mobile phone subscriber paid the airtime charges on all calls, no matter who originated the call. It was an expensive service, so why should the wireline caller get stuck with the bill? The mobile phone subscriber had a normal telephone number. Instead of terminating at a telephone set, it terminated at a two-way radio base station. A radio operator at the base station would complete the call to the mobile subscriber and fill out a billing chit for the call.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I am currently in the market to switch cell phone providers. I am a person who will go over the terms and conditions with a fine tooth comb.
On Cingular's brochure, it had details about the text messaging service. Without a plan, each message SENT OR RECEIVED would cost $.10. You could turn off text messaging, but Cingular would be unable to guarantee that you would not receive any incoming messages.
Huh? I would turn it off, saying I do not want any, and Cingular would still charge me ten cents if they were unable to block an incoming message? How in the hell?
Text messaging seems cool to me, but the outrageous prices here in the U.S. make it unreasonable. Make it $2 for unlimited and I would be interested.
[Note: I tried to find the same paragraph on Cingular's site but they say to the see the appropriate brochure for terms and conditions of featured services like text messaging.]
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Tmobile has the same deal. Until last August, you could even get unlimited *international* text messaging for $10/month. As someone with lots of friends in the UK who like to text message, that was great. Oh well, they still offer unlimited domestic text messaging for $10/month.
Pay to receive?
So cell phone SPAM also incurrs a charge?
Yeesh!
We pay corporations to wear the clothes they make in sweat shops so we can display their logos.
We get increases in ticket prices to go see movies which have become chock full of placed products that advertisers pay the studios to put in.
Now, we pay the cell phone companies every time an advertiser sends us an SMS ad?!?!
WTF?!?!
Next time someone sings the praises of the capitalist free world, I'll be sure to shovel all that back to them and remind them how great it is that big business can freely make us pay through our noses!
I don't think 10 cents a message can be considered "arbitrary and complicated".
At some point, the carrier should have done an automatic "courtesy upgrade".
Do you know of ANY common service that works this way ? If you bring 12 individual cans of Coke to the cashier at the supermarket, do you expect the cashier to say: "Gee each can costs 75 cents, but a twelve pack only costs $4. I'm going to automatically charge you as if you are buying the 12-pack." ?!?
You end up calling Europe 10 times this month because your uncle has fallen ill. The costs are astronomical. Do you expect your phone company to step in and say, "Well if you had only adopted our Int'l rate plan for $5/mo, you would have cut your bill by 90%. In fact, we are going to ASSUME that is what you would have wanted to do, so we are AUTOMATICALLY signing you up for this OPTION and knock your bill down AS IF YOU ALREADY had this option." ?!?
The fact is that even if a company is trying to save a customer money (questionable why it should) IT CANNOT ASSUME that you would have wanted to add a feature option like unlimited SMS for $10/mo as a continuing monthly cost, which often comes with CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS. YOU must agree to taking on new services and contracts. I definitely don't want companies adding new options to my service plan without asking me, EVEN if it might save me money FOR THAT MONTH.
So then, your argument reduces to, "Well companies simply shouldn't charge that much for SMS. They should put a cap of $10-20." Well fine, go ahead and try to convince a company that that is in its best interest.
The whole issue is Darwinian anyways. People too stupid or undisciplined to regulate their spending NEED to be held responsible for their actions. There is nothing even remotely necessities-of-life about SMS anyways, it is a total LUXURY.