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Texting Teens Generating OMG Phone Bills
theodp writes "Last month, Washington high school junior Sofia Rubenstein used 6,807 text messages, which, at a rate of 15 cents apiece for most of them, pushed her family's Verizon Wireless bill over $1,100. She and other teens are finding themselves in hot water after their families get blindsided with huge phone bills thanks to hefty a la carte text messaging charges." Use of SMS in the US doubled from 2005 to 2006.
Prepaid phone.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
..just a different way of doing it. Sounds like kids still needs to be taught about the consequences of their actions.
I personally hate text messaging.
It's convenient once in a while- I get about 1 a month. For situations that you can't be disturbed in, it occasionally makes sense to text.
However, I don't get the obsession with texting that some teenagers have. Why text when you can talk? It's a heck of a lot easier, and texting is a literal pain to (I don't get how someone can type 200 texts a day and not have their fingers fall off).
It seems kind of silly to use text messages on a device with such limited input. A few phones have keyboards, but even then the keys are so small it's easier to talk.
Now it is 15c each way. I dont see how they can justify charging that much for a tiny exchange of data. It has risen WAY faster than the rate of inflation on a technology that should become cheaper (look at how minutes have come down) and it is ridiculous. My guess is that the only reason it works for the phone companies to do this is that the first people to start using them heavily are the kids with their parents buying them mobile phones. They dont have to pay per message so they dont think about the ridiculous costs (look at how much data is in a text message and how much a provider charges for data usage and it becomes clear how much of a rip off it is).
Bottles.
Giving a cell phone to a teen WITHOUT giving them instructions or restrictions, would be like handing the keys to your car to a teenager that just got a drivers license. Oh wait, they do that too. If you are going to give your teenager a cellphone, without either blocking SMS, or restricting its use, the parents are to blame. It's like anything else with most teenagers. If you don't define the restrictions, they will abuse it.
Teens have been raking up text bills that even went past those 1100 bucks. No, I don't understand the text craze. Personally, I prefer talking under normal circumstances. It's actually even cheaper here when you compare the amount of data you can exchange in the one to four minutes you could talk here for the price of one text message.
Kids have always had insane phone bills. That phenomenon didn't hit the US with their flat local call plans, but here it's been a lengthy battle between the kids who prefer the impersonal way of communication because it eliminates the "danger" of "saying the wrong thing" with your body, and their parents who have to foot the bill for it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Janet Boyd, a lobbyist for Dow Chemical, said she and her husband "nearly died" when they got a $70 charge for their 20-year-old daughter's text-messaging. They went to an unlimited plan.
There's so many things wrong with that sentence I don't know where to begin.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
If you have something quick to say, a text message is much faster and more convenient. Texting is also particularly useful for bits of information you might need later.
OTOH, SMS is a really crappy technology. I think it's vastly overpriced even given how inefficient it is, but... wow. And the telcos have little incentive to fix it as long as people are willing to pay insane, outrageous prices per byte.
OMG
LOL
I (heart) U
U 2
U See WHF (what's his/her face)
OMG
Ugly
OMG YNK (you're not kidding)
I can easily seeing a totally meaningless conversation with nothing but acronyms and shortcuts and words no bigger than 5 letters, all in the span of a few minutes. Makes me wonder about our next generation. It really does.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
that $200 bill almost spelled divorce.
That's a solid relationship you have there.
But seriously, why is a phone call cheaper than an SMS message? It's all a digital network, so in cost per bit, SMS messages are something like 66 times more expensive than a phone call.
.00006 cents per byte ($0.000006 / byte)
.04 cents per byte. ($0.0004 / byte)
Let's compare: Digital cell phones use about 14.4 Kbps of bandwidth. (which explains their clarity) Figure about 30 seconds of talking to get the equivalent of a text message, with the "Hello, is SO AND SO there? Yeah. Yeah. It's Billie. 'O, o joy ur so kul'. -CHUCKLE- Ok, see you later. By by. ".
That works out to a total of 54,000 bytes, or 108,000 Bytes/minute. I get about 1,000 minutes at $70/month, a la Verizon. Each minute therefore costs $0.07. So the cost per 30 seconds of conversation is something like 3.5 cents, for 56,000 bytes.
An SMS message is, at its longest, 160 Bytes long. Include headers, let's be generous and say it's double that. (it's not) 320 bytes in an SMS message. Here, we're asking for 15 cents for just 360 bytes?!?!?
Voice
54,000/3.5 cents =
SMS
360 bytes/15 cents =
If you were buying soda, it'd be like buying a 12 oz can of soda for about $20 while a 2 liter bottle costs $1.
Does that seem like good math to you? BTW: I bought into "unlimited text messaging" back when Verizon offered it, and have refused to upgrade plans until I get it. I've got a network monitor, and when something goes wrong I can get tons of messages all at once if I'm not careful.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Remember those huge phone bills from long distance BBS usage back in the day? I never reached over a $1000 a month but I've had a few hundred bucks a month on occasion.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
If 1 = $0.15 and = $15, then why is Verizon billing anyone $1100? The max bill should be $15. If I were selling something at $1 for 1 or $10 for 30, I certainly would charge you $12 for 32 of them instead of $32. If I charged you $32, you'd call me sleazy and you wouldn't tolerate it. Why have we been tolerating this from cell phone companies all this time?
All the teachers would need to do is smash the phone of any kid caught sending these messages in class.
In most jurisdictions, that's "willful destruction of property" or a similar criminal and civil infraction.
The rule of law does not allow the government to take private property without fair compensation. A teacher is, at best, part of the government. I suspect any teacher that earned their school a $300 replacement fee would pretty quickly loose their standing.
An "F" or detention is much simpler.
Assuming a 31 day month and assuming she sleeps 8 hours a night, that's an average of one text message every 4.3 minutes all day long, every day. Of course in practice she probably has classes in which her teachers won't allow her to sit there typing away on her cell phone, and has homework (if she actually does it), and needs to put the phone down for a few minutes at meals to use her hands to shovel food into her mouth... so I'd guess that in practice during the time she finds available for texting, the actual rate of message transfer is much higher than once every 4.3 minutes.
Frankly if I had a kid sending text messages that often, I'd send them to a psychologist to try to help them figure out why they have this obsessive compulsive problem that they can't stop using the phone, and to help them get over it. A kid who is texting that frantically all the time has *problems*.
Oh, and I'd tell them they have to pay the bill, even if that means paying me back in installments.
When I was a teenager (like, 4 years ago) I KNEW how much texting cost, and at the beginning of each billing cycle cleared all the text messages on my phone so I could monitor how much I sent during the billing cycle and limit my usage.
It took me about 2 and 1/2 minutes of work a month. As I've always maintained, the vast majority of teenagers are far from the sharpest tools in the shed. It isn't exactly a difficult concept.... each text costs money, hence the more texts you send, the higher your bill will be.
Of course I also paid my own phone bill when I got my first phone at age 15. So a good solution would be to tell your kids that if they want a cell phone, pay for it themselves (no age restrictions on pre-paid plans). Pre-paid plans are also good if you pay for your kids' cell plans, because if they use up all of the money on the account, their phone simply stops functioning.
And last but not least, parents who let their kids use a service that is billed based on usage with no restrictions whatsoever kind of deserve to have this happen.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Because they all suck equally and there really isn't an alternative.
And the assholes who run the companies use that to their advantage.
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When you sign a contract saying 1 = $0.15, you are making the option of not spending $15 for a flat-rate you don't find necessary. If you think you're gonna be using lots and lots of SMSs that month, you should upgrade to the flat-rate plan.
Also, your analogy is flawed: is more like, suppose 1/3 liter Coca-Cola cans were $1 each and 3-liter bottles $2. At the beginning of the month, family A buys 10 such bottles. Family B, however, buys 3 cans each and every day. They will get the same amount of Coca-Cola, but family A saved 10 bucks.
Everyone knows larger packages are cheaper in terms of cost-to-benefit ratio. If you feel you're likely to reach the flat-rate pay-off limit, sign for a flat-rate. If your kids are not manageable enough, use pre-paid plans or punish them cutting other amenities to teach them to value their parents' hard-earned money.
Of course, there is still the wild WTF of having TO PAY to RECEIVE SMS in US, which simply doesn't make any sense to me
Makes me wonder about our next generation. It really does.
Yeah, kids these days. With their new-fangled gadgets and loose morales. There's just nothing you can do to keep them off your lawn.
Seriously, stop wondering about the next generation and own up to the fact that you were retarded when you were 14 too.
Kinda hard to flock to another cell carrier when you're stuck in a 2+ year contract with an absurdly high cancellation fee. And then there's the fact that pretty much all the mobile telcos will do this as well...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I've actually heard of kids in middle and high school who use SMS and IM so much that they legitimately don't know how to spell words like "you", "your/you're", and will use internet abbreviations (lol, idk, etc.) in school papers.
As a teacher...this is true. Have had other teachers show me papers where their students do this & it makes me shake my head. The funny part is that the teacher can't fail the student...the parents will come down on the teacher like a load of bricks. The funniest part is when the students arrive in their freshman college classes & pull this BS.
At every school in the district...cell phones are forbidden to be used. I see them being used in my classes & ask once for them to be put away. The second time...they are taken to the office at the end of the day. The principal is paid the big bucks...he/she can take the heat for "the parents little angels" not being able to follow simple directions like no cell phone usage.
Am I the only one who thinks that ad should be advocating for parents to completely ban their children from text messages?
You & I...along with fewer & fewer people...agree with each other. On the other hand...when "parents" are weak-willed & unwilling to be parents...you expect them to stand up to their "little angels"? Not going to happen. I constantly put up with children verbally attacking me & others for trying to make them mind & do the job their parents are not. Unlike their parents...I know what the word "NO" means in many languages & am willing to tell their "little angels" that no matter what you think...NO means you can't do that...no matter what you think. They don't like that answer...the principal will explain to them what "NO" means.
Once upon a time, your child was him/her self, and turned out well or turned out poorly. There wasn't today's constant quest to blame a parent for all of a child's problems or issues.
A child is a human being, after all--and (s)he encounters many situations, and many environments, while growing up. The home environment is important, and is terribly neglected in today's society--but it's not everything. Similarly, teachers and schooling aren't everything. And scheduled activities aren't everything. And television isn't everything. And free time isn't everything. They all come together and mix it up with a child's nature.
A good parent, yes, can do a tremendous amount. But a good parent functions (largely) within the context of an external world, and some children are harder to raise than others, good parent or no.
Listen carefully to the grammar and syntax of our newscasters. Our newspapers. Our popular entertainment. Compare it to the same forty or fifty years ago.
Some of them do make an effort. But the breadth of vocabulary, the precision of their diction, and the depth of their thought have--for the most part--declined over the years. Multiply that difference by about a thousand and you'll know what's happened in the New York City Public Schools. (Once upon a time, they were among the best in the world.)
There are some counterexamples... but not many.
Stop reproducing
Look at this story. Verizon got a one-off payment of $1100 from one customer, and maybe similar payments for a few more. However, by charging this money, they have alienated these customers, and worse, generated extremely negative publicity for themselves.
Even on technology-loving Slashdot, there have been many responses like these:
- Kids shouldn't be sending so many text messages
- I blame the parents for not controlling kids' use of their phones
- I don't like text messages anyway
The whole story is in effect a big advertisement for cutting down on your use of text messages.Verizon and other phone companies should switch customers who overspend like this to an unlimited price plan, retrospectively for that month - so that the customer never pays that high bill. They would lose money on this deal, but in return they would gain the gratitude of their customers, who are more likely to stay with them, bringing in a steady flow of income from their unlimited-messaging plans every month.
What's more, these customers on unlimited plans are going to send more messages, encouraging those around them to reply, and increasing the overall use of text messaging. Even if their friends or family are using different providers, the increased volume of text messages will increase dependence on mobile phones, creating a culture in which mobile phone use is accepted, and benefiting the industry as a whole.
Even criminals extorting money via kidnapping or blackmail are careful to consider what their victim is able and willing to pay when deciding on their charges. Being careful not to surprise customers with expensive charges is simply good business.
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
Firstly, the kid should be controlled, do children need a damned mobile phone? Maybe I'm old fasioned but we didn't have them 15 years ago when I was a kid.
:/
Why not use a prepaid, why not use an account with cheaper SMS?
The second problem I have with this is the goddamn phone companies charging so much for text!
In some markets where the consumers aren't idiots, the rate for a text is 1c or even less - in Australia it's a nice butt rapingly harsh 22 or 25c on average
The third problem I have is with companies that let exaggerated bills generate in the first place, I realise it's not their responsibility to an extent but every few years you hear of little Jonny dialing a 1800 number to speak to hot wet sluts for 300 hours in a month and his family end up owing 25grand or something - credit card companies put a freeze on excessive bills, where's this freeze for mobile plans?
But really,.... get a damn plan with unlimited SMS or something.
I've wondered a lot of things about texting. Why is it so popular? How do people seem to like it so much when I find it tedious and time consuming, especially when on the go? Why does it cost so much to do on a phone what I can do virtually for free on a computer? The entire mobile communication payment system needs to be changed quickly. It's currently mirroring the dark ages of internet access, when it was mysterious, addictive, and absorbently expensive. When precious online minutes were rationed out for a specified monthly fee. We've reached a new era in internet services, of unlimited fast internet that is mostly fair, free, and open. I can take my laptop outside find a free access point and chat all I want. I can even call people on their I don't know much about cellular communications, but it's so disturbing to me that these devices that are becoming increasingly similar to computers cannot benefit from some of the same advances in pricing. One day I hope that some loophole allows a clever start-up to offer a cellular service that is as free as the internet is. But I doubt that will happen because of the miles of greed-inspired red tape involved with it.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Your conversation can be logically reduced to this
But what if X is true
Stop seeing X as true!
Denying the existence of a problem is one of the most common ways to deal with problems. It does not have good track record, but people usually deny that as well, building a solid fortress of logic against reality.