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.

Comments

Two words:

[mrjb]

Prepaid phone.

Re:Two words:

[TheRealFixer]

I've got 3 words:

No More Phone.

Re:Two words:

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being a pussy: Beat your kid.

Re:Two words:

[__aaclcg7560]

You can do that. Then your kid will yell child abuse to the local Children Protective Services and have you arrested. A talk show host was talking last night about how today's politically correct society won't allow parents to discipline their own children. A spanking is physical abuse. Going to bed without dinner is starvation. Kicking the kid out of the car to have him walk home is abandonment. Won't be long before denying the kid the right to text message is considered a form of abuse.

Re:Two words:

[OrangeTide]

When your child catches on that nothing they do has consequences, then it's that much harder to raise a well behaved child.

Re:Two words:

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Yes, there is an answer: Ritalin.

But seriously, most of the time bad behavior is the result of misunderstood parenting.

Some people give the kid no boundaries and not enough guidance, which is a disaster.
Some people give their kids too many boundaries and too much guidance, which also is a disaster.

(And quite a few parents get it right)

The kid in scenario 1 will feel like their parents don't love it and don't care for its wellbeing.
The kid in scenario 2 will either rebel, or become a follower unable to make its own decisions.

Balanced does it. The real world is an ambiguous place, and your job is to prepare your kid for the real world.

Re:Two words:

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Bollocks. I'm sorry, but you really are just talking politically correct crap.

For a start, there's no such thing as a perfect parent or a perfectly behaved child, no matter how good your intentions. If you really have children and you really believe they're little angels, have you ever had an honest discussion with their school teachers to make sure they're not just hiding their poor behaviour from you and indulging in it elsewhere? A lot of parents don't, and have absolutely no idea what they're missing. (And yes, I have worked in a school, and seen this phenomenon a surprising number of times.)

More philosophically, which is really more cruel to a child, a quick smack when they do something wrong so they understand that their behaviour isn't acceptable, or the emotional trauma of, say, being denied part of their weekly spending money allowance, which will punish them for several days?

Pain is nature's teacher, and using pain to discipline children is entirely natural. Arguments like yours, which equalise all forms of physical discipline, are painting a coloured world in black and white. In fact, I no longer support certain child protection charities precisely because they can't tell the difference between a parent with a temper who regularly beats their child (a genuine and serious problem) and a loving parent who uses occasional physical chastisement to teach their child what is and isn't acceptable behaviour.

Re:Two words:

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with youth. Ritalin is a bad start for the answer. Less then 3% of the "ADD" youth I worked with need Ritalin. However, the rest of your post is right on. Children need boundaries. They need consequences for breaking the boundaries. They need to test hte boundaries and see the consequences of breaking the rules. And please, remember that guidance is guidance, not direction. Directions are great for setting the table (yes, our 2 year old sets the table) and other things that should be done the same way each time, but we don't have a whole lot of rules. We do have a bit of guidance, but not too much for her to remember, and we make sure she learns it before applying boundaries. Children are people, and they learn. "Don't stand on the chair" is a rule that will be broken. "If you fall of the chair, you're going to hurt" is something they can do once and decided to get with the program and not stand on the chair.

You're about the only person here who's not a real retard.

Re:Two words:

[McDutchie]

But what if you're a good parent and your child is just plain evil?

Then physically and mentally abusing your kid will only cause him to become more evil.

So don't.

Instead, stop seeing your child as "just plain evil", and start looking for solutions to his problems.

Re:Two words:

[miskatonic alumnus]

Yeah. We wouldn't want to give them the idea that when they reach adulthood, bad behavior will result in physical threatening.

Re:Two words:

[miskatonic alumnus]

As soon as you resort to smacking, spanking, or hitting in any way, you've signaled your failure as a parent.

According to whom Doctor Spock? You? What makes you the expert? Where's the Ten Commandments of parenting given from on high that works in every possible situation? You're incredibly naive.

This is really nothing new..

[Philus]

..just a different way of doing it. Sounds like kids still needs to be taught about the consequences of their actions.

Re:15 cents each?!

[ottothecow]

they used to be something like 5 to send free to recieve. Then it was 5 to send 5 to recieve, then it was 10 to send 5 to recieve.

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).

Who's disciplining the parents?

[nanojath]

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.

asynchronous, faster, and persistent

[straponego]

If you have something quick to say, a text message is much faster and more convenient. You want to get rid of email too? Hey, let's get rid of forums like /. Why post something permanently when we could just have a giant chat room? All we have to do is get everybody together at once. In fact: let's all meet in person! It's ever so much more personal that way.

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.

Re:Not just kids ... talk to my wife

[Anonymous Coward]

that $200 bill almost spelled divorce.

That's a solid relationship you have there.

Three letters: WTF ??!?

[mcrbids]

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.

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 = .00006 cents per byte ($0.000006 / byte)

SMS
360 bytes/15 cents = .04 cents per byte. ($0.0004 / byte)

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.

Ah the good ol days

[nEoN nOoDlE]

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.

Re:Unlimited SMS..

[bwalling]

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?

Re:Parents and teachers are pussies.

[Planesdragon]

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.

Re:Unlimited SMS..

[loraksus]

Because they all suck equally and there really isn't an alternative.
And the assholes who run the companies use that to their advantage.

Re:Why text when you can talk?

[Bogtha]

Why text when you can talk?

It's an asynchronous conversation. If I want to know if you are coming to the pub later, I don't need to know right now, I don't need to interrupt what you are doing, and I don't particularly want to chat, because that's what we'll be doing at the pub. If I see a programme on television about fat chicks, I might text my mate — who is a bit of a chubby chaser — to take the piss, but I don't necessarily want a response or to talk to him. And from a purely lazy perspective, sending a few words via text message just seems like less hassle than a conversation. I'll typically talk to between six and ten people when deciding what to do at the weekend, it takes much less attention and time to do it with SMS than with voice.

Slashdot translation: voice == TCP, SMS == UDP. Voice and TCP require a set-up, whether that's a three-way handshake or a "Hi how are you doing?". SMS and UDP just communicate the relevant information and let you deal with it in your own time.

It's not only kids...

[Etherwalk]

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.

Phone companies are hurting themselves

[Gregory Cox]

I agree it's unfair. In the end, though, phone companies doing this hurt themselves more than they hurt their customers.

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.