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"

Comments

Responsibility

[AlexTheBeast]

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.

Re:Responsibility

[beagle]

Yup. I mean - oh, the horror of learning that things in life really aren't free!

This is a story?

PS - there was an article in the local paper recently about how "the fees add up fast." Indeed they do, and this is why I don't have many of these monthly-fee services.

Shocking truth

[DaKritter]

Commercial services may cost money!

Shock horror.

Re:Shocking truth

[ahknight]

It's not even that, it's that they're using it wrong, too. For instance, with Sprint I can pay $10/mo. and get unlimited SMS messages. For $10. Screw this $800 crap, with just a little planning and a little forethought they wouldn't pay more than $60 a month for the whole package.

It's just another sign that people are stupid.

Re:Shocking truth

[penguinoid]

Commercial services may cost money!

Wrong. Or did you mean to say, "Commercial services may be expensive." It may be splitting hairs, but sending SMS messages costs almost nothing but is grossly overpriced. For no reason other than that it is usefull enough that people will pay anyways. Ahh, the free market at its best!

one simple solution

[kraut]

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.

Re:one simple solution

[Seumas]

I'm 27 and I don't own a cell phone. I never have. I've only used one a few times. I'm a software engineer for a big corporation required to provide 24x7 responses. To that end, I wear a $10/mo company-paid two-way pager.

Carrying a cell-phone around strikes me as needless baggage and excessive availability. I prefer not to have to be reachable by every human being on earth every moment of every day. I'd like to consider my time sipping a coffee and reading the paper in the local cafe on a Saturday morning as _my_ time. Nobody should ever need to reach me so urgently that I need to carry a device that would permit disruption of that.

I understand why UPS drivers need a cell. I understand why cab-drivers need to. I can even understand why a CEO or an IT manager might. But beyond that, it's just a frivolous toy. Children managed to keep in touch with their parents and let them know where they were and what htey were doing for decades prior to this without posessing cell phones.

If I had a child, I can't imagine them providing any viable excuse as to why I should purchase a cell phone for them and pay the bill. And as their parent, I would not let them get one and pay for it themselves for the simple fact that I want to avoid them putting themselves into debt before even seeking out college loans a few years down the road.

Why six year olds and fifteen year olds are carrying them around like a house-key is beyond me.

Re:one simple solution

[zakezuke]

If I had a child, I can't imagine them providing any viable excuse as to why I should purchase a cell phone for them and pay the bill

1. Payphones are not everywhere anymore. Even when I was in school there was only one payphone on campus for grades 7-12. Now there is none.
2. Collect calls cost an arm and a leg. After getting a few "come pick me up" calls I was in awe.
3. Calling cards don't always work in payphones.
4. You can often get a family plan with unlimited airtime between family phones.
5. Safety

I'm not saying that getting a cellphone for a kid is the right choice. But there are good reasons why one may consider it. I went with a pre-paid phone for my nieces. "Come pick me up" cost 25-55cents and there was no chance in hell there would be a charge above and beyond what was pre-paid.

In A Related Story...

[da3dAlus]

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.

Pay to recieve SMS?

[MPHellwig]

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)?

Re:Pay to recieve SMS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Recieving mail is free. Most cell phone plans, recieving text messages is free, sending costs. However, kids will use them at school like IM clients, so they can talk to their friends without the teacher noticing (I'm in High School, I see it a lot). They'll hold the cell phone under the desk, and talk back and forth. Having gotten used to IM responses, short messages are used. $0.10 for "LOL" is excessive in my mind, but they don't seem to realize it (until they get the bill!)

Re:Pay to recieve SMS?

[gstoddart]

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?

It's not just the US. Here in Canada it's the same. My carrier once decided to give me a 'free' trial of the service (no subscription fee, still pay to receive). I found out I was getting it when I got two spam text-messages. Then I got charged for receiving the text messages I didn't want. That was why I hadn't ordered the service in the first place.

It's in the carriers interest to have you use the service if they get to charge you the fees for receiving the messages.

I've never been happy with a model where someone I don't know or want to communicate with gets to cost me money. That's like collect calls from telemarketers.

Do you guys also have to pay for recieving post (with a stamp)?

Shh. They're listening and might think that's a good idea. :-P

Answers

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

People are stupid

[BenjyD]

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.

Ridiculous pricing

[Mike Schiraldi]

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?

Re:Ridiculous pricing

[HeghmoH]

I asked basically the same question on slashdot a while ago, and got an interesting response. Of course I can't find the post now, so I'll have to go by memory.

Basically, when the GSM standard was first created, SMS messages weren't thought about too much. They were shoved into some teeny little side band that was used for low-bandwidth control information or something along those lines. The designers didn't forsee the incredible popularity that SMS would have in the future. The end result is that even though SMS messages are incredibly low bandwidth, and there is a ton of bandwidth floating around, they can't use it because they're restricted to this tiny piece of the spectrum. That's not to say that the price isn't also due to some nice gouging on the part of the companies, but there are good technical reasons for a minute of relatively high-bandwidth voice to cost less than an SMS.

This is pure speculation on my part, but this may also by why MMS often costs less than SMS even though they usually contain a lot more data.

Re:Ridiculous pricing

[Graymalkin]

Many providers, including T-Mobile and AT&T/Cingular in the US, have moved to SMS over GPRS. Most if not all handsets sold now also support SMS over GPRS which has much more bandwidth available than traditional GSM messaging channels. SMS messages are sent via GPRS like any other bit of data. There's little reason for GSM carriers to charge obscene amounts of money for messaging (other than to rip us off).

Ideal phone advert..

[t_allardyce]

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"

Re:How much do you pay for SMS

[MaynardJanKeymeulen]

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?

Re:How much do you pay for SMS

[wing03]

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!