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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.
I know that certain companies like Cingular (now ATT) let you send text messages to people via email... e.g. theirnumber@my.cingular.com or something similar to that.
Don't most of these companies charge on incoming messages, too? Wouldn't you just be able to spam the crap out of somebody's number to run up their bill?
In any other industry, I'd expect them to have this base covered... but you never know with the phone industry.
Peace sells, but who's buying?
In many situations, it is both superior to and FAR more polite than yapping. I had my first cell phone when I lived in Japan, and I sent and received about twenty messages a day. Talking on cell phones was banned in many locations including public transportation, and severly frowned upon in most other public locations. It was like heaven.
Then I returned to the US: People yap while driving. Yap on the bus. Yap while in line. Yap yap yap, oblivious to the people around them or how annoying (and dangerous) they are being.
I blame this largely on the cell phone providers. It is obvious that a text message is far cheaper for them than a phone call, as the amount of information to be sent is tiny. Yet here in the states, text is expensive, typically the price of a minute of talk or so. In Japan, a text was 2-3 cents, while a minute of talk nearly ten times that. Text was automatically part of any plan that I saw. Such pricing is sensible, given the large amount of data that needs to be transferred for live calls, and the fact that it has to be immediate.
American wireless companies should drop the price of text down to a fair price (pennies) in order to encourage its use. Not only is this the fair market price, but it would help the adoption of a great complementary technology to direct voice communication.
Sounds very expensive to me. Here in Korea the normal price for 1 sms is around 3 cents, but no operators offer flatrate, due to its abuse by spammers.
At first, in Korea, all major carriers had provided flat rate plans, but once cell phone spammers started to abuse them (custom SMS spamming software + PC + flat rate plan = unlimited spamming capability), they quickly removed it from their plan list.
Seriously, I used to recieve 20+ SMS spams a day on the worst ages, but once carriers started to provide spam filtering (free of charge, can disable any time), the spam rate dropped to less than one per week.
However, there still are service plans that even provide 1000+ free messages per month, and it seems to be enough for most people.
Anyway, flatrate seems to be troublesome, and it seems to be (sort of) surprising that US carriers have those kind of rates.
i-only-want-som ething-that-can-call-and-receive-calls
Like this?
First there was this guy whining because it took more than one button click to bail out of the credit card subscription to an anti-virus service, now it's parents whining because they didn't anticipate that the cel company provided less minutes than their kid uses.
Is it really too much to ask that people read the contract or EULA, and if they accept it, not complain when they find that they made a mistake?
I'm not even remotely Libertarian, but for God's sake accept some personal responsibility for your actions.
Three Squirrels
My son is in his second year of university. He says that a lot of these kids use their phones to talk with each other while in class. If they start talking normally, or even over their phones, the professor will hear, and thus will quickly put an end to their conversations. But when text messaging, it's nearly undetectable.
He says he's seen some people try to cheat on tests by messaging each other answers. Back in January or February he was telling me about an incident that he witnessed during a test he was writing. Apparently a group of five or six students from India or Pakistan were sending each other answers over their phones. The professor suspected they were cheating, and confronted some of them. They denied cheating, saying they were just using their phones as calculators. The professor still confiscated their phones anyways. A couple of those students started whispering to each other, so the professor kicked them out of the test.
So it's easy to see how a typical multiple-choice test, with perhaps 75 to 120 questions, could lead to several hundred messages being sent by a student, especially if there's collaboration between several other students. Of course, they probably wouldn't have to cheat on the tests were they not sending messages to one another during class, and instead paying attention to the lecture.
Yeah, the kids need to be taught about consequences of their actions, but more than that the parents need to be taught that the kids are THEIR responsibility and need to be taught what is right and wrong, and if they can't control the kids then the kids shouldsn't have cell phones. I can't stand all these parents who are shocked at the bills their kids rack up and then call up the press to get an article somewhere in the hopes that the company will drop their bill because of the bad publicity. You created the problem, now figure out a way to deal with it. Too many people blaming society for things that are solely their responsibility.
I only have a baby, can't really relate to this exactly. However, I have many friends/coworkers who have teenagers, and I have to say that if I was in the market for a cell phone for a kid I wouldn't get a prepaid cell phone, but I'd get something like the disney phone. It's close to what I'd want, but not exact. Phone companies should really cater to the product that parents want, and not flat rates that make them the most money when the user's go over it.
Here's what I would want in a phone for a teenager:
Fully featured cell phone (wouldn't want the kid to feel like a reject with one of those four button phones)
Flat monthly minutes (rollover is preferred in the unlikely event they aren't all used)
'Normal" features such as free roaming, long distance, etc
The kicker is that when the included minutes or texts are used up, the phone does not allow any incoming or outgoing text messages, and only allows phone calls to predesignated password protected numbers (home, parents cell, etc). If the kid tries to send a text message or make a call to an unapproved number it will prompt for a password or request a calling card / prepaid card number to add extra minutes.
This way it is completely impossible to go over your minutes in a month, except by just a couple for emergency/calling home usage which would never amount to more than $5/month. I don't know why there isn't a product like this on the market, although Disney does come close from what I heard about it. This is really what parents want even though they don't know it yet because they haven't ever seen it. No parent really wants to give their kid free reign with a cell phone.
My dad had a paddle and he put a date on it every time he used it.
That [paddle] was something [grand]parents used to give their children when they became grandparents.
My 6th grade teacher left her paddle on her desk and drilled a hole in it every time she used it.
Nothing like hearing the screams of disobedient kids in the halls of my school to keep the rest of us in line.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
If they actually paid attention to their cellphone bill, all it would take is a phone call to customer service to add prepaid txt messages for a fraction of what they'd pay after the fact.
That or they could just take away the phone, but this way everyone's happy.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Not sure about in the U.S., but in Canada SMS is provided by third parties, not the main cell phone companies. This is the case with all 3 major Canadian networks (Telus, Bell, Rogers). I work for one of them, and we were just discussing this the other day.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
It's cheaper because if you charge 15 cents for a text message, you can sell 40 bajillion minutes for $8 a century, beating your competitor's 40 bajillion for $12.
The cheap minutes sell the plan, the texting makes the money.
Also, they can. This is how it works with a free market with ridiculously high barriers to entry. It's insane, but you'll eat it and you'll like it.
Though legitimately, I assume there is some overhead involved in creating a connection over and over (finding the customer's current cell and whatnot) rather than just maintaining one, but I can't imagine that actually comes close to making up the difference in price per bit.
But what if you're a good parent and your child is just plain evil? Then it becomes a Catch-22: if you do something, you go to jail; if you do nothing, you go to jail. My Dad had that argument with a judge when I refused to go to school and the judge couldn't tell him what the solution was. Society has no answers for the children who are not perfect little angels. As a parent, you're screwed either way.
No doubt it kept you in line but at what cost. How many people grew up with issues becuase of the borderline physical abuse they suffered. Its not about how bad the beatings are really, its about the anticipation and fear of a beating. That really messes with children's heads.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
When I was still a little kid, my brother went through what we call his "rage" period. He'd get so insanely jealous and angry over the smallest things, he'd get into a fury and break things, smash down my door, and even though I was a year older, he could easily beat me to a pulp. I was so afraid he was going to kill me.
...Okay, so I still say he's an idiot with problems out the wazoo, but that's a sibling thing. But what could my parents have done? They took him to therapy, they took him to the hospital, they punished him by taking away possessions, what else could they do? Hitting him would certainly result in reports of abuse. It really can be that some kids are just fucked up in the head.
Years later it turns out he has a number of mental conditions and it's taken years of therapy, but now he's a semi-normal boy.
What I'm about to say goes against just about everything modern society says to us, but I believe it's the truth:
PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT. WHAT WORKS FOR ONE WILL NOT WORK FOR ANOTHER.
When I was a child, I was rather... obedient. If my mother said "do this" or "don't do this," I did or didn't do it, respectively (I'm sure if she said "kill a man," I might have had some objections, but thankfully, such requests were rare). I didn't really need much discipline. And when I did, taking away my games or a time out always seemed to make me feel guilty, and I apologized, etc. All in all, physical violence was not needed.
My brother, though, as I've explained, was an altogether different story. Can it be that even though we are siblings, we are quite different, and thus require different methods to develop properly? *LE GASP!*
I theorize (though I am not a psychiatrist) that some kids can learn discipline through a time out. Some may require a little yelling or a slap on the wrist. Some kids might need a good boot or a belt to their backsides. And some kids... well, some kids are just rotten, and no sweet talking or belt slapping is going to change that.
Is this view that bizarre? Whatever happened to "Some people are just naturally selfish jerks?"
Except for a couple of trips in the mountains (out in the middle of nowhere, national park-like mountains), and in a few underground shops in Paris, I don't remember any case of not having cell-phone signal in the last seven years or so, anywhere in Europe. That's while going from Romania to the UK and pretty much every country in between, with the same cell-phone and the same GSM card (during each trip, of course, I've changed the phone several times).
Have you ever read any of JD Fitzgerald's books? Other people aren't pussies like you, they don't grow up with issues because of a few bruised buttocks.
7 cents a minute seems insanely cheap to me - either that or New Zealand cellphone costs are insanely expensive. In NZ, voice costs around $1/minute on cellphone. (I pay $20 monthly with Vodafone for 20 GSM minutes; this is an entry-level plan but fairly standard). For a 1100 minute plan, I'd pay $370/month - $0.33/minute, rock-bottom mininum.
n s/you-choose/index.jsp
Meanwhile, texts begin at 20c each and for $10/month drop to 0.5c each.
http://vodafone.co.nz/personal/plans-services/pla
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
*grabs a pysch book and points out Pavlovian response*
You know what? As a kid, if I did something stupid, my parents spanked me. Guess what? I usually didn't do the same stupid thing twice. You want to know why, Camper Dan? Because, shockingly enough, I didn't want to get spanked again.
It's one of those marvels of thought. "Hey, I did activity X, and my parents said 'Oh hell no!' and spanked me. And 'lo and behold, I learned... they do not have a sense of humor about me starting fires, or getting in fights at school, or any of that shit."
I'm not saying that we need to have every parent resort to playing "Punch the Monkey" with their kids, but there is a damn large difference between spanking a disobediant child and physical abuse. Maybe if you took a really healthy dump and got rid of that hippie liberal crap, you'd realize this.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
How can anyone send 227 text messages per day ?
This happened to me I paid for 300 text for each line. The first month they went over they paid me the costs, but the next month the bill was over $500 ( son sent over 3k messages in 2 weeks) Called my carrier and removed all text capabilities from their phones.
Daughter asked me months later if they she could pay for text again, I told her that I pay for a phone so I can call her, If she wants text she needs to get her own.
Easy, I warn every parent to remove text.
> 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.
That suggests an interesting punishment... install a spellcheck on the cell phone and only allow text messages that conform to standard rules of spelling and grammer. For one thing, it'll cut down on the number of messages since they have to type more ("laughing out loud" takes longer than "lol"). For another, the kid will actually get some experience with the language they'll need in other venues.
Of course, I suggest this only after a complete ban on all text messages until the kid pays the bill him/herself.
"You're about the only person here who's not a real retard."-- I doubt someone who actually works with children and professes enough "insight" to claim only 3% of ADD children require treatment with Ritalin would stoop to using such an insensitive and callous term as "retard" so casually. They would typically have developed significant understanding and compassion as a result of dealing on a daily basis with the human consequences of Downs Syndrome. If not, perhaps they're in the wrong business.
I could make the point that children are not adults, but I'm not going to.
Instead I'm going to point out it's not the same thing. In fact, no modern democracy uses force on criminals the same way you're advocating using on children; criminals aren't beaten with sticks as punishment, or slapped on the wrist when they steal. Force (at least when the law enforcement institutions work) is used to apprehend criminals, not as punishment; police forces don't exist to punish, but rather to make sure criminals are apprehended so they can be punished, removed from society for society's safety, and/or rehabilitated. Ideally for them, criminals would give themselves up and walk into precincts handcuffed... unfortunately they don't, which is where truncheons and guns come in.
I'm all for using force to keep children from hurting others and themselves, but using it as punishment is barbaric; the fact is, we don't use the cane or torture devices on criminals in prisons - why would we do the smaller-scale equivalent on children for much lesser infractions?
Besides, the primary lesson corporal punishment teaches is "I'm bigger than you, so I get to tell you what to do." It raises bullies, and children educated primarily through punishment, corporal punishment in particular, will stop being behaved as soon as their parents aren't around to beat the shit out of them any more.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.