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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
Solution: forbid her from texting her bff Jill.
You know Verizon does have unlimited SMS plans for only $15 per month... Just a thought for someone paying a $1100 phone bill... :-)
..just a different way of doing it. Sounds like kids still needs to be taught about the consequences of their actions.
So hitting F5 on Slashdot regularly is better?
The more you know, the less you need. [Admin added: from me.]
Sadly, yes. Most companies ALLOW text messages on their phone even if you don't have it in your plan. If other people send you messages you will be billed their fixed rate per message (incoming), even if you don't reply. If someone else has unlimited text messaging they could effectively start spamming people (everyone remember the old pager bombs?) with the consequence of massive phone bills.
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.
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.
Perhaps you should take advantage of the new and popular acronyms to save time and make texting easier. Here are some relevant to your interests:
GOML (get off my lawn)
IGAB (I got a bingo!)
DFOL (dentures fell out laughing)
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 you were honestly thinking about divorce over a paltry sum of $200, you really might wanna go over why you married in the first place. :)
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
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
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.
Durex.
Nuff said.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
Parent is the only reply to get it right. It's not that the cellular providers are ripping us off (well, at least not just that)—it's that SMS bandwidth is extremely limited (see also here, here, here). For shame, Slashdot!
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
I used to work in the Engineering department of a mobile service provider, so the information here may be somewhat out of date, but the principles are probably still the same today.
In general, mobile communications networks don't use the same channel for everything. For example, you might have several frequencies available, use one as a control channel (registering handsets as they move around; handshaking to set up calls, etc.) and then have several channels used for voice data.
Now, it's not unusual for small data messages, such as SMS, to be carried on the control channel rather than voice channels. That means there is much less capacity available for such messages than for voice, because they have only a single channel, and they are also in competition with all the network registration traffic, etc.
Moreover, the testing overhead for data messages can be higher than voice calls. Certainly for the network I worked on, every call type was made between every possible combination of approved handsets and checked by a real person before new software went live. (Yes, that did take months.)
So in fact, from a technical point of view, it's entirely unfair to compare voice and data transactions. That probably doesn't matter in practice, of course, because prices will no doubt be set by what the market will bear rather than what it costs to provide the service. That usually means voice and basic texting are relatively cheap these days, but things like photo messaging (or whatever the bonus feature du jour is) tend to cost more.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
that $200 bill almost spelled divorce.
That's a solid relationship you have there.
He was being literal. When he ripped the bill into shreds and threw it on the floor, the pieces spelled out D-I-V-O-R-E-C.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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.
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