The Cultures of Texting In Europe and America

Ponca City, We Love You writes "The cultures of text messaging are very different in Europe and North America, according to an internet sociologist named Danah Boyd. Americans and Canadians have historically paid to receive text messages, but 'all-you-can-eat' data plans are beginning to change that. All-you-can-eat plans are still relatively rare in Europe. When a European youth runs out of texts and can't afford to top up, they simply don't text. But they can still receive texts without cost so they aren't actually kept out of the loop. What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. "

Comments

First post??

[phantomfive]

Hmmmm nobody seems to be very interested in this story. I can see why, the text of the story itself is enough to put someone to sleep. A long blog entry in small type with no pictures, and not especially interesting anyway.

People text until they have to start paying for text messages, then they don't text so much. Is this really surprising? College students and high schoolers text more often. That's about it.

Re:First post??

[Anonymous Coward]

I know - this is a post worthy of Kdawson.
 
I take that back - It's a strange strange day where a Kdawson post is the most actively replied story.

Re:First post??

[slimey_limey]

It's not that nobody is here. Thing is, the story was retroposted by something exceeding two hours.

Re:First post??

[harmonica]

I didn't know about how people are charged in America, so this was interesting to me. The sheer number of text messages sent by typical teenagers was also a point of interest.

The font size is normal. If you consider that text long, how did you manage to get through school, let a alone a typical Slashdot comments page? As for the lack of pictures: this is not kindergarten. Nobody needs those symbolic images used in typical online news articles that never add anything to the story (a candidate in this case: a picture of someone using a cellphone).

Re:First post??

[foobsr]

The font size is normal.

Last time I checked 'x-small' was not considered normal.

CC.

Re:First post??

[Seumas]

Unlimited texting plans in America seem to be around $20/mo and individual messages are about 15 cents (so one message plus the recipient replying to you will cost each of you 30 cents for a total of 60 cents). How fucking much do you have to be texting in a month to make this worthwhile? If you're a kid, go home and get on the computer and use IM if you absolutely need to chat. Or if you have a cell phone, PICK UP THE DAMN THING AND DIAL.

I know people who run through hundreds or thousands of messages every month. What in the hell do you need to say so badly that you can't call someone or IM them from a computer? I mean, YOU HAVE A CELL IN YOUR HAND. Why would you opt to text instead? And don't tell me "because most situations require that you be discreet in your communication". Really? Where in the hell are you wasting the majority of your waking hours that you can or need to send thousands of text messages?!

I can see some situations where it might be potentially useful to send a couple text messages here and there (but sure as fuck not hundreds or thousands) -- but not for the absurd prices carriers charge.

Re:First post??

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlimited texting plans in America seem to be around $20/mo and individual messages are about 15 cents (so one message plus the recipient replying to you will cost each of you 30 cents for a total of 60 cents). How fucking much do you have to be texting in a month to make this worthwhile?

Slightly over two per day (if you count one incoming plus one outgoing as one unit), which is hardly excessive. And I think you're missing the major advantage of SMS - it's not that it's discreet, it's that it's asynchronous.

Re:First post??

[CmdrSammo]

I'll tell you why I tend to text more than I call, because I don't think it's particularly polite to be talking on your phone in a generally quiet public place, library, shop etc. In these cases it's a lot easier just to fire off a quick text. Also if you have a girlfriend then if I didn't text she'd literally want me on the phone for about 6 hours a day, and this is not good! I am in England though and over here we get pretty much 'all-you-can-eat' tariffs. I am on £20 a month with O2 at the moment (I work for them, hence a staff deal) and get 1000 minutes and 1000 texts, more than I'll ever use. Even since I've had this tariff I still text people all the time, it just seems stupid to ring people to ask them a quick question and as someone else has mentioned texting is asynchronous. I can text my mates when I'm out late at night and not worry about waking them up, but still get a response to my question in the morning. I guess it's probably different state-side because you guys can talk for England...wait..America!

Re:First post??

[Piazzola]

I can give one good reason: I have a hearing difficulty. Certain people's voices, including that of my ex-girlfriend, are very difficult for me to understand over the phone, so she and I tended to hold long conversations by text message while we were still dating but temporarily away from each other. It was hell on my bill (seeing as I DIDN'T have an unlimited plan) and between what I sent and what I received, we easily got into the thousands of messages.

Re:First post??

[cayenne8]

"I know people who run through hundreds or thousands of messages every month. What in the hell do you need to say so badly that you can't call someone or IM them from a computer? I mean, YOU HAVE A CELL IN YOUR HAND. Why would you opt to text instead? And don't tell me "because most situations require that you be discreet in your communication". Really? Where in the hell are you wasting the majority of your waking hours that you can or need to send thousands of text messages?!"

I never knew much about texting...or T9 word completion...till Katrina hit, and any cell phone in the 504 area code...just could not be dialed. However, texting did work....so, learned how to use it then.

I find it useful often when in situations where it is loud and you can't hear...like at a show/concert....or especially in a bar.

I generally prefer email....but, sometimes if I know the other person isn't at a computer...I can text from work...and that way...no nosy neighbors hear the "conversation" if using SMS....

Re:First post??

[CommunistHamster]

Here in the UK, during the 2005 suicide attacks on the London Underground, neither texts nor calls could get through.

Re:First post??

[draevil]

I think the main reason that no one is interested is that its content is mostly nonsense and speculation.

Take for example the assertion that:

What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive.

Aside from this being bizarre, you only need to look at the statistics to see that communication (in the form of texts) is not "muffled". Approximately 1.2 billion texts were sent each week in the month of September in the UK.

There are lots of other assertions without supporting evidence - i.e. that there are no unlimited data plans in Europe - well I know T-Mobile offers one in the UK alone and I'm sure that there are others.

In general: a poor article with little or no structure and no references for its assertions.

Re:First post??

[stinerman]

And I think you're missing the major advantage of SMS - it's not that it's discreet, it's that it's asynchronous.

If only someone designed a service where you could do voice communication asynchronously, a sort of voice message service. Maybe an enterprising lad will figure out a way to encapsulate VOIP data in SMS packets. Until then, I'll just have to send text messages to people who aren't at their phone or call them back every 10 or 15 minutes until they answer.

Re:First post??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the size that matters, but what you do with it.

Re:First post??

[Seumas]

I didn't say that the occasional text message wasn't useful. I've had a time or two where I've been in a meeting and used text messaging to let someone know what time I would be ready to meet them after work. But even if those exceptions are fairly frequent, you're talking about MAYBE a couple dozen messages a month.

The majority of texting seems to be actual full blown conversations or pointless "HEy WUT U UP 2?!" and crap that banters back and forth for 800 inane volleys. The problem I have with text messaging is not that it doesn't have any useful purposes, but that it allows for an explosion of constant inanity regardless of where you are and when.

I don't have a text messaging plan, because I don't want to spend $20 per month JUST for text messages. And even though 15 cents every message is a lot (and a second 15 cents if I reply), I've managed to keep people limited in the amount they text message me, because they know I will almost NEVER respond to them. But even so, the few messages a month they do send me (maybe four or six), they are always pointless.

Seriously, is it worth 15 cents for you to send me a text message with only the word "hugs" or "miss you" or "see you tonight"? I mean, if I see you every night, do I need you to text me to state the fucking obvious?!

So, why do I care if people let text messaging reduce their conversational skills to crisco and carry on endless inane conversations over text messages? Why is it my business? Well, I don't and it isn't. EXCEPT, that they keep the industry afloat when it comes to text messages and their willingness to pay any price and accept any absurd plan formalities and requisites makes it more difficult for everyone else to expect better plan negotiations in somewhat the same way your local multiplex is going to stuff Fred Clause on every movie screen, instead of a good movie, because Fred Clause is what will bring the drones to fill the seats. And as long as they're willing to fork over cash for crap, the market will just be flooded with crap.

Now, I'm not in the UK so perhaps your services and plans and options are far better. But in the states, they largely suck.

Also, in the states, text messaging seems to be the domain of teenagers (and as time goes on, edging into college aged set). As I understand it, everyone uses text messaging in the UK of all ages. I don't really know any adults who text message and I'm surrounded by people in the tech industry on a daily basis.

Re:First post??

[tehcyder]

Unlimited texting plans in America seem to be around $20/mo and individual messages are about 15 cents (so one message plus the recipient replying to you will cost each of you 30 cents for a total of 60 cents). How fucking much do you have to be texting in a month to make this worthwhile?

Well, isn't $20 divided by 15 cents 133 which is roughly 4 or 5 a day? Doesn't seem like that many to me.

Re:First post??

[coastwalker]

You totally miss the point of texting in the US because its just not loud enough for you.

Text is asynchronous and does not demand an instant response, voice on the other hand is instant, insistent and unpardonably rude. There quite simply is the reason Europeans use texting and Americans do not, Europeans are reserved and polite and Americans are loud and rude.

Remarkably this differentiation even extends to the youth who we usually associate with the next appalling fashion in uncouth behavior, they like texting even more than their elders and betters. Alas this may be the real reason that texting is so fashionable amongst the youth of Europe. You see old fogy's - dribbling old folk such as ancient parents in their thirties. Well they live in the black and white silent movie past where push button phones are a bit flash. Mobile telephones are what people in starships called the Enterprise use and talking to one of these new fangled things is already stretching the boundaries of the possible. Its particularly tricky for them to find the button that connects them to other people, the rats nest of multifunction menus jog dials and soft keys often make this a task filled with horror.

But you Americans for some reason have obedient pliant youth who maintain the traditions of their elders and rather than texting just to demonstrate how inadequate their parents are - they persist in holding actual human to human voice communications, how quaint is that!

Re:First post??

[lsatenstein]

Does anyone know the difference in costs for cell phone use in Europe vs USA? I would say they have several million more cell phone subscribers, and they pay less per month. Noone pays for incoming calls. How do you stop incoming calls without being able to block them? My cell provider does not offer that option.

Re:First post??

[phantomfive]

who is 'they'?

US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[zanderredux]

I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive. I read somewhere that it had to do with technical limitations around billing systems and that it just became like that by tradition (or because US law made it impossible to reverse it)

Clearly, who makes the call is the party who has the necessity to communicate, not the receiving end. Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Z80xxc!]

Quite simply because they want more money. Charge them sending and receiving and you get twice as much.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[mah!]

for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive.

hear, hear.
Not only this, but this mechanism of paying for 'airtime' on received calls, just as for received SMSes, is so engrained in most cellphone users minds that they'll strenuously defend its 'logic' (excessive use of quotes intended).

It'd be just as bizzarre to charge the receiving party for a long distance phone call. Yet apparently cellphone users accept it, just as they accept the absurd incompatibility between GSM and CDMA (good thing TDMA got scrapped at least) as inevitable side-effect of a 'free market' (yup, there are those quotes again).
Funnily enough, there are very few other countries around the world who charge cellphone users for receiving an SMS or a cellphone call... of course, <sarcasm> this is because of GSM's anti-capitalistic approach </sarcasm>.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[phantomfive]

OK, text messages are one thing, but paying extra to CALL a cell phone just sucks. How do you know if you are calling a cell phone? You don't, until you get the bill at the end of the month. So then you have to keep track of who has a cell phone and who doesn't, and when you want to borrow someone else's phone, they always ask, "are you going to call a cell phone?" No way. Let the person who has the cell phone worry about if it is more expensive for them or not.

That was my feeling after living in a place where the caller had to pay extra to call a cell phone. Your feelings may be different. But I doubt it.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[nick_davison]

Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning??? To play devil's advocate...

You have the option to not pick up - especially with caller ID coming by default on most cell service.

Ultimately, a call requires the same resources, on your provider's end, whether you make or receive it.

It is arguably more contradictory of basic economic reasoning to try and figure out some consistent rate that receiving service providers get paid by the calling provider being the sole billing party.

Say it is agreed that 10c/min should be split 5c for the calling provider's costs, 5c for the recipient's network.

The calling provider can now never offer free calls after Xpm because they're still responsible for giving 5c to a third party. Even if they are willing to offer their own lines for free after a certain time, they still have to pay out.

Similarly, say the recipient manages to dramatically increase efficiency and it now only costs them 3c. They're never going to agree to only bill 3c while their competitor takes 5c. They'll push for the same 5c and simply drop their own calls to 8c a minute (3c for them, 5c for the competitor) to have more attractive policies. The competitor manages the same efficiency increase and we're stuck with 8c/minute calls both ways instead of the 6c it actually ought to cost.

So, in terms of economic simplicity, it actually makes far more sense that each end charges their customer whatever they want to charge, whether coming or going, and leaves it up to the customer to decide whether or not to call/answer.

Not saying I like that reality (I'm an Englishman living in California and I quite liked not paying to receive calls). However, I can understand it in terms of simplicity.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[mah!]

I accept your reasoning if you accept to pay for receiving long-distance calls. From anywhere.
Go ahead, let the person who receives the long-distance call worry.
How do you know if you are calling long distance or even another country, hmm?

Ah, you'd like to say there's no way to tell whether you're calling a cell phone? But then, how would the company know to charge you more then? Can't you find it out too?

Such are my feelings after using cellphones in both situations for extended periods. Your feelings may be different. And I do not feel arrogant enough to doubt it, if that's what suits yourself...

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Frogbert]

In Australia we have this amazing system where mobile phone numbers start with different numbers to land line numbers.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[deniable]

How about the phone companies have wholesale pricing. If you put a call onto my network you pay me $x/min. You then pass this back to the guy who made the call. It means that each link in the chain is a customer of the next guy and believe me, billing systems are the part they get right every time. Given that phone companies are evil, greedy bastards do you think they will trust each other to share costs? No, they'll treat each other as customers. It's one of the reasons why it's cheaper to call some countries and not others.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

In Australia we have this amazing system where mobile phone numbers start with different numbers to land line numbers.

In America we have this amazing system where we can keep our phone numbers regardless of what device we're using. We don't have to tell everyone we've ever met to update their phone books when we change from a land line to a cell phone or from one company to another.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[cyberwench]

Unfortunately, simply choosing not to pick up won't necessarily make a difference. I had the most ridiculous bill when I was down in the States visiting despite my not picking up any calls that came in. The reason was, the cell company billed you for the roaming call simply because they had to use other people's lines to make the phone ring - regardless of whether you picked it up or not. Good luck finding that one in the FAQ.

Thankfully, I'm finally rid of this horrible company and I'm on a nice tiny plan where I never pay more than $15 a month for exactly the same service I was paying $60-$150 a month for before.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[_merlin]

Can you keep the same landline number in different geographic regions? Didn't think so. How is that any worse than having a different number for landline or mobile? We can keep the same number when we change companies or move a landline within a local area. We can keep our mobile numbers wherever we go, on whichever company we want. The US system gives the carriers an excuse to keep the stupid receiver pays system in place.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive. I read somewhere that it had to do with technical limitations around billing systems and that it just became like that by tradition (or because US law made it impossible to reverse it)

Clearly, who makes the call is the party who has the necessity to communicate, not the receiving end. Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???

Because it's the person receiving who has chosen to use a more expensive device for his communication needs. The caller has no control over what kind of a phone the person has, and it shouldn't be their responsibility to have to figure it out.

The legal history also requires that phone numbers not be allocated based on devices, because when they were we had a lot of trouble with people spamming fax machines -- giving out numbers based on devices just makes it easier to wardial. SMS spam is nonexistent in the US because it's impossible to know what numbers are cell numbers. Ultimately the number nondiscrimination law ended up making something far more important very easy, which is number portability. Here in the US, we can take any number with us from a landline to a cell or vice-versa, and between companies without restriction. We couldn't do that if we had special prefixes for different devices or networks.

Ultimately it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Folks under both billing systems have some advantages and some disadvantages. Americans pay some of the lowest amounts for cell phone air time, so it's not as if the system we have is ripping us off for airtime. We have a lot of other problems in our cell industry, but the billing allocation system isn't really one of them.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Yvanhoe]

Yeah, I am sure that phone companies are really worried about this illogic reasoning that brings them extra profit on the short term. Of course, never mind the fact that in the end people try to phone less, they don't have that kind of long term planning.

Oh, and don't believe that it is hard to change the billing system. I remember the beginning of the cell phone era, when texting was free. That's right FREE. I heard that originally it was developed by telecom engineers as a test protocol. Then it was released for clients but nobody thought people would want to type text on a 12 keys keyboard. Here in France, a study has shown that a text message billed 20 or 30 cents to a client costs in fact less than 1 cent to the phone company.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[hdparm]

In NZ we have a new Guinness Book record holder - texting blindfolded.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[grotgrot]

The reason is because the US does not use dedicated area codes for cellphones like most other countries do. Consequently as a caller you cannot tell the difference between calling someone's home phone vs calling someone's cell phone as they will have the same area code. Conceptually the reason why you have to pay for incoming calls is because the call goes to your home area via conventional means, and then goes by radio to your phone. You have to pay for that last radio hop. (Of course it doesn't really work like this now, but that is how it all started). This also means that you don't get charged extra to call a cellphone as happens in many other countries.

US consumer psychology is also very different. Historically US consumers have always preferred fixed bills versus variable bills, even though many would save money with variable bills. This is the reason that local phones calls are free - the cost is fixed, not actually free. The Internet also took off here early on because of that - plans were almost entirely fixed cost. For cell phones, everyone fixates on the plan with how many bundled minutes it includes (fixed cost). Competition has led to voice minutes being underpriced, so the carriers ding on other services such as data, SMS, sending/receiving picture messages etc. Some carriers (Verizon Wireless) go so far as deliberately crippling features in phones they sell so that the only way to do various things is via them, for a charge. (And in general phones are carrier locked in the US, and cannot be used with another carrier even if unlocked, or can but with significantly reduced functionality). Verizon even went so far as making SMS messages very expensive if you don't buy a bundle to encourage people to sign up for bundles they mostly don't use fully. To put things in perspective, a text message consumes about as much bandwidth as one tenth of a second of voice, but is typically charged the same as 60 to 90 seconds of voice.

Apologies for not being able to cite the consumer preferences for fixed billing source. A story was posted on /. several years about the research paper, but I haven't been able to find it again.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Bogtha]

paying extra to CALL a cell phone just sucks. How do you know if you are calling a cell phone?

In the UK, all mobile phone numbers start with 7. I believe this is common in other countries as well, so charging more to call a mobile phone is perfectly reasonable in these places.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[bytesex]

Pfff ! Collectively bearing the cost of a service; what are those Americans you speak of - communists ?!

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[xlsior]

I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive

Easy -- Because then the carrier gets money twice.

And since that's standard practise among cellphone carriers, it's not like there's a huge incentive for them to stop doing it.

(It is unfortunately, though -- I was pretty much forced to disable texting on my own cellphone because it got a ton of junk texts on it (recycled number?), and didn't feel like paying either the $10 unlimited texting option nor felt like paying $0.10 for each unsollicited message. In essense, they lost the chance to make any money off of me since now I can no longer send any messages either.)

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[jrumney]

SMS spam is nonexistent in the US because it's impossible to know what numbers are cell numbers.

You can't send SMS to landlines in the US?

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know if you are calling a cell phone? You don't, until you get the bill at the end of the month. And this I think is the reason for the differences between the US billing system and the European billing system: In the US you don't know whether you call a cell phone, in Europe (well, at least in all countries I know the system) you know it's a cell phone by the prefix.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[dascritch]

I'm in France and before the launching of the GSM, we had a analogue radiotelephone system (commercial name was "Radiocom 2000"). In the beginning of the 1990s, my father got one in his car, and the number he had was a local one (attached to our town, namely was beginning in 61, latter, with new numbering plan, it would be 05 61, or "geographical" when starting with 01-05). People who called him where paying a "normal" price (the monopolistic france telecom were running very excessive tarrifs at this moment), and he was charged of the price difference. Because of the local number he was allocated, the consumer was believing his call charged as a landline one. With the new numbering system, the "06" prefix was attached to mobile operations, pagers (still some), analogue, and the brand new GSM systems with a public (Itineris, aka France Telecom, finally named Orange) and a private operator (SFR). That prefix (and the ones like "08" for premium charged rates) are differently charged because they are not "geographic numbers". And so, GSM are not billed when they receive calls, but their correspondents are paying more, because they know that "06" is a mobile line. When "triple play" FAI started their box (namely, Free.fr, with internet, tv, and phone), the new phone line you got from their modem had a 087x number attributed. A very big problem, because Free was advertising that their number have a local tarrif everywhere they are called, but France Telecom (historical operator, still proprietary of all the landlines, concurrent with the Wanadoo/Orange brand) was attributing thoses numbers until 1998 the premium numbers. Because of the exploding demand onto these boxes, and to stop the confusion, since last years, all "degrouped" lines via triple-play FAI, have now 09 prefix. Don't think that Orange is raging about that : now they're happy because they hotlin have less angry phonecalls about inconsistent billings...

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

In America we have this amazing system where we can keep our phone numbers regardless of what device we're using. We don't have to tell everyone we've ever met to update their phone books when we change from a land line to a cell phone or from one company to another. On the other hand I presume that you have to change your cell phone number if you move (out of the local area). Or does your phone number also not have a regional prefix? Changing providers is also not an issue here (in Germany). Of course you can not make a landline number a cell phone number or the other way round (though there are tariffs where you can transfer your land line number to your cell phone as an additional number).

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[zsau]

So area codes in America aren't geographically based then? Do you always have to dial all ten digits of a number every time you call?

In any case, in Australia most adults who've always had a land line also have a mobile phone, so they actually have two numbers, whereas younger people tend to only have a mobile phone and if they have their own home they might have a landline but not generally use it. (What good is switching your number from a mobile to a landline if you can only receive calls then when you're at home?) The mobile number works just as well in Hobart as in Darwin, and the landline number can be moved to any landline in the same local area.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

Can you keep the same landline number in different geographic regions? Didn't think so. How is that any worse than having a different number for landline or mobile?

If you change from a landline phone, which is provided by a regional company, to a phone provider that isn't regional, then yes, you can keep the old regional part of the number. And people change phone companies and technologies a little more frequently than they move thousands of miles, so even without that, it's still an advantage.

You consider our billing system stupid, I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay extra for what device someone else is using.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[zsau]

04xx xxx xxx = pay extra (mobile, anywhere in Australia)
03 9xxx xxxx = don't pay extra (Melbourne)

just the same as

02 xxxx xxxx = pay extra (NSW, ACT)
03 5xxx xxxx = pay extra (regional Victoria)
1800 xxx xxx = pay less (free call)

I gather Americans like their system of conflating mobile numbers and local numbers because you can easily switch from one to another, but I'd personally like to know if I'm calling a mobile so I can know how likely they are to answer it. And number portability would confuse everyone if you could take a landline number from Melbourne to a mobile in Perth, but with a separate prefix my mobile number doesn't care where I live.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

> Can you keep the same landline number in different geographic regions? Didn't think so.

Yes. It's a service that nobody private normally wants since you have to pay per minute for incoming calls (or have a higher incoming price than a local call), like in the US but it's very easy to get location independent numbers (they start with 0845 or 0870 in the UK). These never change, no matter where you are and can be redirected to fixed or mobile lines. Furthermore, there's this simple service called call forwarding. This can even be done for geographical number for which you no longer have an actual telephone. You have to pay for it of course. In other words; we have the choice and so most people choose differently from the US.

> We can keep our mobile numbers wherever we go, on whichever company we want.

So can we in all of Europe. It's (only/even?) free if you move within one country from the same type of operator to another I admit, but it's definitely possible. Have you ever checked what proportion of people actually use this service?

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[skolima]

The prices you US citizens pay for GSM are horrendous. Yup, your electronics cost 50% of what most Europe pays, but the cellular operators surely screw you over. On the other hand, in Europe the cellular costs vary greatly. I use prepaid and have to pay a minimum of 20$ per 3 months of usage, which is pretty low. Sms is the main form of communication for me - basic cost with my plan is .4$ . However, I purchase sms packets - 1000 for - guess how much? - 2$. So thats .2cent per message. Other prepaids in Poland offer similar deals. On the other hand, last month I texted quite a lot with a friend in the same network. However, she uses a business plan... and paid over 100$ dollars for our chats!

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[raju1kabir]

Clearly, who makes the call is the party who has the necessity to communicate, not the receiving end. Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???

Basic economic reasoning stipulates that you get more efficient markets when the people who are paying for a service have market power.

If you do it the European way, the people who are paying for a call have no ability to select a different provider for the bulk of the charge.

That's why the American way is economically more rational, it's why settlement costs are so much lower in the USA, it's why a growing number of Asian countries are doing it that way, it's why Australia is considering switching, and it's why everyone will do it that way in the long run (unless flat-rate billing takes over first).

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

On the other hand I presume that you have to change your cell phone number if you move (out of the local area). Or does your phone number also not have a regional prefix?

You don't have to (any more), though most people do like a local area code if they're planning on staying in the new area. Our geographic area code system is slowly dying, everything is still allocated that way but we keep adding overlays and allowing newer services that are flexible in code allocation (like VOIP).

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[mah!]

You can't send SMS to landlines in the US?

Mostly not. Amazing eh?
There was no teletext either. (not that the two are related technologies)

Lack of standards in both cases I guess... from wikipedia: "Adoption in the United States was hampered due to a lack of a single teletext standard and consumer resistance to the high initial price of teletext decoders."
The same place which finally produces a reasonable unlimited data plan can't seem to offer simple data services such as landline SMSes as standard.
Ah well, pros and cons of living in different places around the globe.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Kadin2048]

It's quite simple. For a 'dialer pays' system to work, you need to know that a number is a mobile instead of a landline. That means giving out mobile numbers that are different from landline numbers.

That's just not how the U.S. system involved. When the first cellphones came out, the networks were operated by the local/regional telephone companies, and they gave out local telephone numbers for them, from the blocks they had been assigned, just like any other line. (In fact, getting a local number was pretty important, so that people calling you wouldn't have to pay long distance, and neither would you when you called them -- early AMPS plans frequently didn't have unlimited long distance.)

No regional cell operator was in a position to offer nationwide service early on, and there frankly just wasn't that much top-down coordination driving the process (and why should there have been? they were expensive toys for rich people). I doubt that the switching system could have handled a national cellular prefix or area code without a huge overhaul, anyway. That's just not how it was designed. Combined with the fact that there just aren't enough available area codes in the U.S. POTS namespace to give every current area code a secondary 'mobile area code,' and there's just not a feasible way to do dialer-pays.

Plus, I think dialer-pays plans in the U.S. would have held back the adoption of cellphones significantly. One of the reasons people liked cellphones was that it gave you a real, regular local phone number, which happened to be mobile. The calling party never had to know it was mobile. Really, what the U.S. system boils down to is "convenience pays." If you want the convenience of a mobile, you pay for it. The caller just pays for the landline call to wherever the area code that the number is located in, the person with the cell pays for the airtime over the cell network. I think this is pretty fair, actually, and judging by how quickly cellphones became popular, I think a lot of other people did, too. (Also: the only dialer-pays extra-fee numbers in the U.S. are the "1-900" numbers, and they're generally regarded as pretty sleazy; the domain of phone-sex operators and psychics, mostly. Not the sort of thing you want your budding technology associated with.)

In short, a caller-pays system just would not have been feasible in the U.S. given how the system developed, and I think if the issue had been forced, bad things (including a delay in uptake of the technology or consumer rejection) could have resulted. There are fundamental differences between the cellular market in the U.S. and Europe (which stem, in not insignificant part, from the fact that European phone systems were still a lot more centralized during the inception of cellular service than the U.S. was), and I don't think there's really any reason to assume that what works in one place is necessarily the best everywhere. The European system may seem conceptually more consistent, but the U.S. system allows for no-change number portability from landlines to cells, and makes cell lines 'equal' for a caller to a traditional landline.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Ed Thomson]

How do you know if you are calling a cell phone?

The same way I know that I am going to have a higher telephone bill at the end of the month when calling twenty year old Cindy at my favourite sex line.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

So area codes in America aren't geographically based then? Do you always have to dial all ten digits of a number every time you call?

In any case, in Australia most adults who've always had a land line also have a mobile phone, so they actually have two numbers, whereas younger people tend to only have a mobile phone and if they have their own home they might have a landline but not generally use it. (What good is switching your number from a mobile to a landline if you can only receive calls then when you're at home?) The mobile number works just as well in Hobart as in Darwin, and the landline number can be moved to any landline in the same local area.

Area codes are created based on geography, but they're not limited to that geography. I think at this point, most of the US does have to use 10 digit dialing, I vaguely remember hearing that over 50% of the population was in a ten-digit area as of a few years ago, because every major city has had to add new codes that are much more loosely defined.

The historical difference is that in Europe (and much of the rest of the world, presumably Australia though my apologies if not :D ), land lines were relatively expensive and bureaucratic hassles, but in the US they were pretty cheap, so we didn't adopt the cell phone as a form of regular communication. Many people here only had a cell phone "for emergencies" or occasional use, it was never a part of their daily life and the number wasn't important. Their home phone number was, so being able to transfer that important number to the cell and get rid of the landline entirely is a big deal.

If you want to look at it another way, you could switch your landline to a VOIP service for home and keep the number, keeping your cell as it always has been. The idea is that having certain numbers tied to certain devices or services is inherently limiting -- nobody could have predicted VOIP twenty years ago, but it's a more practical choice when it isn't restricted to some specific number block that may stigmatize it.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[raju1kabir]

The reason is because the US does not use dedicated area codes for cellphones like most other countries do.

That's not the reason. There are mobile-device area codes (e.g., 917) and if it were desired (or desirable), they could be implemented nationwide.

The receiver-pays billing system is a specific policy choice.

There are only two ways to keep termination costs under control.

1) Strictly regulate them: "You may only charge up to US$0.02/minute to terminate a call."

2) Allow the market to sort it out: "Call costs will be borne by the customer, so they have the opportunity to switch to a different carrier if the price is too high."

Not surprisingly (given the prevailing dogma) US regulators chose to go with the free-market approach.

The European system creates a market failure that requires aggressive regulatory intervention because carriers have little incentive to reduce the amount they charge other carriers' customers to call their own customers.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, cross-connect call charging is not done on a per-call-per-minute basis. It would be infeasible to track and collate that sort of information between all the network providers. Instead networks have cross-connect agreements with a fixed cost, based on the expected traffic they'll route onto the other providers networks. The originating network can pass on whatever charges they like to their users.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

I'd personally like to know if I'm calling a mobile so I can know how likely they are to answer it.

That's precisely part of the reason we *didn't* allow cell phones to get stuck on a different prefix, we didn't want people to be treated differently because they were using a cell number (whether good different or bad different). We wanted cell service to be a transparent addition to the existing phone network, and only the cell customers would have to worry about any adaptations that were necessary or extra expenses.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[AvitarX]

It probably has to do with the fact that cell-phones were primarily business for a while, and like 800 numbers billed the receiver.

Also the non-portability of early phones (attached to cars) probably meant they were not convenient to receive calls on in general and were used mainly for outgoing calls, this meant that weird billing for incoming calls may have been a on-issue.

Lastly, I don't know how it works in other countries, but paying for incoming calls is a small price to not worry about getting telemarketers calling.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[_merlin]

You consider our billing system stupid, I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay extra for what device someone else is using.

And should the receiver pay for a long distance call? If you don't want to pay, don't make the call. I don't want to pay for receiving unwanted calls from telemarketers. I don't want to pay to receive text messages used for verifying online transactions. I like being able to pay for a call to a pre-paid mobile service with a balance of zero. If I want to call a person and be able to reach them even if they aren't at home/work, I should have to pay for that. If I don't want to pay more, I can call them on a landline, and put up with the fact that they may not be there.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[weave]

Makes sense to me.

With multiple carriers I can shop for the best price I can, on both received and sent calls. If all incoming calls are charged to the caller, then the person calling you has to be charged whatever the telco wants. There's no economic incentive to drop the cost. The caller to a mobile number can't shop for a better rate.

In the U.S. buckets of minutes are so cheap it's not really an issue.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

And should the receiver pay for a long distance call?

The receiver isn't the one choosing the long distance service. Since the receiver IS the one choosing which cellular service to use, they're the only one in a position to shop for a better deal.

Look, I'm happy you like your system. But it really, truly, seems just as stupid to us as ours seems to you. I think it's perfectly reasonable for *me* to pay for *my* desired level of mobility. I would consider myself a jerk to ask my friends to pay extra to call me just because I decided to go to a museum in the afternoon rather than stay at home or the office. To me, that just seems like an incredibly rude and arrogant thing to do, to expect someone to pay extra to talk to me because *I* chose to step out for a bit.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Xiaran]

was pretty much forced to disable texting on my own cellphone because it got a ton of junk texts on it (recycled number?), and didn't feel like paying either the $10 unlimited texting option nor felt like paying $0.10 for each unsollicited message

I think this statement sums up the weirdness that non Americans feel about your cell phone billing systems. Something like what you describe should really be illegal.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Yer Mom]

I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay extra for what device someone else is using.

Well, I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay to receive a call when I didn't even ask the caller to make it. Particularly a problem with SMS, as you can't even look at the CLI and hit Reject.

Roll on free universal wi-fi. Then we can just use SIP and the IM clients of our choice :)

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[TheRealSync]

If you don't want to be "treated differently", just because you happen to be on the road, you just set up forwarding of your landline. Any call to your landline will be forwarded to your mobile phone, and you pay the difference in price - the person calling you pays the regular landline price.

I know for a fact that it's possible in Denmark, at least, because I used to have such a setup. Actually the forwarding got enabled whenever I turned my mobile phone on, so I had to remember turning it off whenever I was at home, if I didn't want to pay for receiving calls.

Anyways, my point is: With the european system, you can actually choose to go "the american way" (though you need to have a landline as well as a mobile phone).

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[POPE Mad Mitch]

It certainly used to be the case in the UK that the 10p per sms message fee was charged entirely by the senders network provider. Network providers charged no fee to recieve incoming sms messages from other providers. The amount of inter-network traffic was fairly even, so the fees gathered on each message leaving the network covered the costs of delivering those that entered.

However, there was an increasting number of bulk-sms (ie spam) sending companies, these companies were generating lots of messages, which the networks would deliver for free, but never got any sent to them, so the networks were loosing out.

So the networks declared that they would split the fees, 5p in, 5p out. This means that the total costs for sending a text between network providers remained the same, but the bulk senders now had to pay costs.

The end user billing has remained the same as it always was, sender pays.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[heffeque]

So you are saying that you have one single phone number for every phone you own? The phone at home has the same number as your phone at work and your cellphone?

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[heffeque]

And now that cellphones with wifi are starting to catch up, some operators are making cellphones work as land line phones when connected to a wifi device so at home/office/etc all national land line calls are free (incoming or outgoing) and when you're outside your phone works as a cellphone with it's normal tariffs.

Oh, and there's an operator in Spain that offers unlimited internet data for 1.2 euros a day, so if you have a good cellphone then it's 36 euros a month for unlimited calls (if you use VoIP), unlimited eMule :-D and unlimited everything. Not bad, huh?

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[saforrest]

I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive

On the other hand, Europe takes it "the initiator pays" to a degree that might be considered extreme to North American tastes: when calling a European cell number, you pay much, much more than you would when calling a European landline. (This is the case in France and Italy at least.)

When I learned this a couple years ago, the difference in price was a factor of 10. Of course, with Skype now this aspect of things is not such a problem.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Eisenstein]

Of course the caller can shop for another service provider if he is footing the bill. In a system where the costs are charged to the caller not the service provider of the called person decides what the call costs, but the service provider of the caller (layed down in the contract of course). Thus the caller has full control over it. If he calls a mobile he knows how much more he has to pay compared to a landline.

He has it easier, because he doesn't have to care about incoming calls, only about what things he calls most/uses most and which of those calls costs him most, and make his decision based on this.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[pthor1231]

There are services that do that.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Tim Browse]

Oh, and don't believe that it is hard to change the billing system.

Oh, believe it :-) When MMS (multimedia messages) first hit the UK, everyone charged a fixed rate per month for the ability to send them - except for Orange. When quizzed on why they were 'ripping off' their customers, Orange responded that the reason they were the only ones charging per message was simple - they were the only company with a billing system that could charge per MMS message. All the other telco's billing systems needed upgrading, and they would charge based on the number of messages sent if they possibly could.

Also, I was once told a story about a room in a telco with a bunch of (6?) DOS based PCs. When asked why these PCs were there, my contact was told they ran the telco's SMS system for the whole of the UK. They were terrified of changing it. And this wasn't as long ago as you'd like to think :-)

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[GuldKalle]

You have the option to not pick up - especially with caller ID coming by default on most cell service.
To move back on topic: you can't choose not to pick up text messages

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[poot_rootbeer]

Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???

You're looking at one side of the economic equation, which is consumer psychology. The person placing the call is the one requesting a service, therefore he alone should be billed.

I'm not sure I find this argument all that compelling. Would most people find a mobile phone that could place, but not receive, calls to be useful? I carry a phone because I want people to be able to communicate with me, and I'm willing to pay for the service when someone does need to reach me.

There's also infrastructure. The cost of carrying a call on a cellular network is the same whether the call was originated on the local handset or remotely. It's easier for them to bill the same regardless of where the call originated than to charge normal rates for some airtime, and eat the costs (or enter contracts with every other carrier to recipocally recoup costs) of other airtime.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[GuldKalle]

The legal history also requires that phone numbers not be allocated based on devices, because when they were we had a lot of trouble with people spamming fax machines Isn't that kinda backward logic on the lawmakers side? Why not outlaw [fax|txt]-spamming instead? (And remember to make it opt-in instead of opt-out).

Americans pay some of the lowest amounts for cell phone air time, so it's not as if the system we have is ripping us off for airtime. But you pay for both incoming and outgoing, so it's not just a dollar-to-dollar comparison. (I'll leave the actual math up to those who have the power to change it).

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[ChakatSanddancer]

Isn't that kinda backward logic on the lawmakers side? Why not outlaw [fax|txt]-spamming instead? (And remember to make it opt-in instead of opt-out).

It already is. Having everything grouped together is just another way of discouraging cell wardialling by people who figure that the costs of the fine are lower than the income they'll receive from spamming.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[GuldKalle]

The European system creates a market failure that requires aggressive regulatory intervention because carriers have little incentive to reduce the amount they charge other carriers' customers to call their own customers. I think I have an incentive for them here:
If we take two carriers A and B, and their clients 1 and 2. A has an agreement with B about how much it costs for A when 1 calls 2, and vice-versa. This price is of course offset to 1. if A wants a better agreement, so he can give 1 a lower price, he has to offer something in return: a better price on B's agreement.
Of course, if A is the only big player on the market regulation is required. But then again, the free market seldom works when there are only a few players on the field.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[cayenne8]

"t'd be just as bizzarre to charge the receiving party for a long distance phone call. Yet apparently cellphone users accept it, just as they accept the absurd incompatibility between GSM and CDMA (good thing TDMA got scrapped at least) as inevitable side-effect of a 'free market' "

Well, to be fair...Joe Q. Public really has no idea or, nor concern with...the technology or acronyms behind how his cellphone works. GSM, CDMA, ABCDE....he hasn't a clue what you're talking about. As long as the phone rings, allows calls and whatever to go through...that's all he cares about.

Quite often when talking about tech....we have to step back and realize that the avg. citizen....doesn't have a clue about the tech behind things, nor will he ever care either.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[raju1kabir]

If we take two carriers A and B, and their clients 1 and 2. A has an agreement with B about how much it costs for A when 1 calls 2, and vice-versa. This price is of course offset to 1. if A wants a better agreement, so he can give 1 a lower price, he has to offer something in return: a better price on B's agreement.

But why would A want to do this? If A and B don't make this agreement, they both keep a higher price (which means more revenues from termination fees) and are in no danger of losing customers.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Captain_Chaos]

The reason is because the US does not use dedicated area codes for cellphones like most other countries do.

That makes perfect sense! Thanks, I'd been wondering the same thing for a long time. In the Netherlands all mobile numbers start with 06, so a caller can alway tell they're calling a mobile number. So receiving mobile calls or text messages is free. Except when the receiver is roaming abroad. The caller may be able to tell they're calling a mobile number, but not that the phone is currently abroad, so the receiver actually pays for the extra cost of being called while roaming. (I don't think that applies to text messages though, those are free to receive even when you're abroad.)

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[cayenne8]

"On the other hand I presume that you have to change your cell phone number if you move (out of the local area). Or does your phone number also not have a regional prefix?"

Nope...not anymore. ON your cell...you can keep your same number (including area code) forever basically, no matter where you move or go to.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[heffeque]

Seems like it still hasn't cached up to be a general public service to me.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[pthor1231]

You didn't make that stipulation, and after reading the guy you replied to, I don't even understand where your comment came from.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Phisbut]

It is arguably more contradictory of basic economic reasoning to try and figure out some consistent rate that receiving service providers get paid by the calling provider being the sole billing party.

Bullshit, such a billing system already exists and is efficient. When you do a long-distance call over a landline, the callee uses up resources but only the caller pays. Why can't it be the same for cell phones is beyond me.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Rexdude]

Here's the Indian side of the story- The Indian govt. opened the market for mobile operators around 1994, and initially the situation was similar-people were charged for airtime and so had to pay for incoming calls. Call rates were also quite expensive- Rs. 12 outgoing/Rs. 8 incoming and so on-compared to 3 rupees for landline calls. Thus mobile phones remained expensive toys for the rich, and the normal practice was to cancel an incoming call and use the nearest land line to return the call! In 2000, the govt. mandated that operators could not charge for incoming calls, and at the same time, SMSes were introduced free of charge. This is what led to the explosive growth in the mobile market, which continues to grow, and today you can pay as low as 0.3 rupees a minute for outgoing calls depending on the talk plan. (40 rupees to the dollar, so that's about 2 cents every 3 minutes!). Oh, and you're free to pick and choose your operator and your handset-no contracts to lock you down.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

"The European system may seem conceptually more consistent, but the U.S. system allows for no-change number portability from landlines to cells, and makes cell lines 'equal' for a caller to a traditional landline."

This is absurd. Landline systems are obsolete. Yes! Obsolete! I live in Finland and I must say that there are no practical reasons for this 'equality'. Cell phone calls are so cheap that there is no need for a landline system, most people are slowly getting rid of them. The GSM network coverage is 100% and the reliability is also very good.

Maybe you should reconsider? And please, drop the fax machines from the technology indexes at the same time you stop seeing POTS as a technological triumph.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[cervo]

AT&T prior to their wireless division being bought by Cingular did not charge to receive text messages. Even after the buy, until I renewed my plan as a Cingular customer I received free text messages. Unfortunately, once I renewed the plan to a cingular plan text messages received were suddenly charged for. Now that Cingular is AT&T again, I see no plans to bring back free text message receiving.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive. I read somewhere that it had to do with technical limitations around billing systems and that it just became like that by tradition (or because US law made it impossible to reverse it) Clearly, who makes the call is the party who has the necessity to communicate, not the receiving end. Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???

Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[mah!]

Well, to be fair...Joe Q. Public really has no idea or, nor concern with...the technology or acronyms behind how his cellphone works. GSM, CDMA, ABCDE....he hasn't a clue what you're talking about. As long as the phone rings, allows calls and whatever to go through...that's all he cares about.

Of course the general user does not have to know about GSM vs CDMA - maybe no more than FM vs AM radio...
What puzzles me is that customers (in very few countries fortunately) accept the fact that they can't physically use the cellphone on 1/2 or more of neworks...
Compare that for example to buying a car radio and not being able to receive signals of 1/2 of the stations, or losing radio signal in your radio where the car on your right receives the same program because it's coming from another provider... great thing, incompatible 'standards' eh?
But I've heard several people defending this as 'part of the free market mechanism'.. nonsense, since radio and TV have been quite regulated in the same geographic markets, with no danger to the free market (well, certainly no worse than the oligopoly of mobile phone providers).

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Gnavpot]

here (in Germany). Of course you can not make a landline number a cell phone number or the other way round

Well, here just 100 km north of Germany, we can. We can take our landline number with us to another geographic region or to a cell phone.

And it doesn't cost us extra - it is by law. But we do take a chance every time we dial an unknown number since we can't know if we are paying for calling our neighbour's land line, a land line in the other end of the country or a cell phone.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically, you've chosen a cell service that works at home and the office.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[skintigh2]

For the same reason my bank charges me a fee for not installing an ATM where I need one and not providing me the service I require and therefore forcing me to use a competitor's ATM which also charges me: because they can.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - the mobile phone system sucks bigtime.
I moved from UK to US recently and bought a mobile phone (pay as you go, no contract -- this worked well for me in the UK). It turns out that *receiving* an international call costs *the same* as is does to make a call to another phone in the US. Money grabbing bastards!
Such a great system -- now, if I happen to run out of credit and someone rings me up I am unable to answer the phone! And the impoverished student trick 'I'm running low on credit -- can you ring me back?' doesn't work. Oh yes, I also now have to pay to receive numerous spam SMS text messages....

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

So you are saying that you have one single phone number for every phone you own? The phone at home has the same number as your phone at work and your cellphone?

I have one phone and one number. I use it for work, home and mobile. Because we don't have numbers that specifically identify themselves as mobile, this works fine, since people don't assume I'll answer a work call out of hours, but this way I have the option.

But even if I didn't use one number, it makes no difference to my point -- asking someone to pay extra to contact me because *I* chose to leave work early or go run errands doesn't seem very polite. Whether they called one number or two or ten to get me doesn't make any difference, we have the expectation that if someone is local, we'll just pay for a local call.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

Isn't that kinda backward logic on the lawmakers side? Why not outlaw [fax|txt]-spamming instead? (And remember to make it opt-in instead of opt-out).

Fax spam wasn't the SOLE reason it is illegal to discriminate on numbers, just one of the earliest practical problems faced by service discrimination. (and making something illegal doesn't make it magically disappear, so having both a legal and a practical obstacle to spamming has worked out quite well for us, unlike email which only has a legal prohibition)

The more economically important reason was that we didn't want to allow people or companies to be treated differently because of their phone number. Making devices and services transparent to the system in theory means more competition among providers, as you have mobile operators (and now VOIP) competing directly with landline operators for the exact same business.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[NMerriam]

Well, I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay to receive a call when I didn't even ask the caller to make it. Particularly a problem with SMS, as you can't even look at the CLI and hit Reject.

Don't answer calls and you don't pay for them (or rather, they aren't deducted from the huge pool you've already paid for and probably won't use up anyways, so it makes little practical difference to most people).

Yes, SMS is the problem -- you're being billed for a "push" service you can't reject individually, and I absolutely expect recipients to get SMS free in the future, the current billing system is hurting the providers just as much as the customers. it's baffling why they've stuck with the SMS system as it is for so long.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[GuldKalle]

Because then C and D will swoop in...

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[raju1kabir]

Because then C and D will swoop in...

And do what?

Let's say C sets its termination rates lower than A and B.

Every time a C customer dials an A number, C still has to pay high A termination rates, and they can either pass them on to their customers or lose money on the call.

Meanwhile, A can offer its own customers a discount on calls to C numbers, without losing anything. C is then left without any price advantage, but has considerably lower mean revenue per air minute.

As long as the market is structured so that sellers set their competitors' rates rather than their own, it will always be distorted and tend toward high prices. It's a fundamental flaw in the European caller-pays model.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[davidsyes]

Two words:
"Yankee Capitalist"?

Three words:
Greed begets greed.

Four words:
If the complain... TOUGH!

Five words:
A Sucker Born Every Minute!

I doubt it was a billing problem. They were just too damn cheap, lazy or not-competed-with-enough to bother billing for sender-side action.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[stinerman]

Hell, you can effectively DoS someone and run their bill to astronomical levels by texting them repeatedly. It is quite easy using the SMS functionality of Pidgin or other IM programs.

Sure, you can get the charges removed if it's an obvious case (thousands of sequential messages from the same sender), but you'll be on the phone for awhile talking to a CSR (probably using your minutes). If someone really wanted to screw with you, they could set up a bunch of sock puppet accounts on any IM service and rotate between several of them.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[amRadioHed]

Compare that for example to buying a car radio and not being able to receive signals of 1/2 of the stations, or losing radio signal in your radio where the car on your right receives the same program because it's coming from another provider... great thing, incompatible 'standards' eh? Sounds a bit like satellite radio to me.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[brue68]

maybe it's just my area, but in the Petersburg area of Virginia (US) I can tell who's using a mobile by the first three numbers (though admittedly I haven't memorized the first three digits of all the carriers, they are different from the first three digits of the landlines)

so, there's the area code (804) and then the seven digit number. for Verizon in this area, the first three digits of the seven digit number can be 586, 731, etc. (1-804-586-XXXX)

the local numbers will start with 991, 526, 732, 861, etc. (1-804-526-XXXX)

at least that's my understanding.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[zsau]

I meant treated differently by other people. I will have different expectations of calling a landline and mobile. I can call someone during the day on their mobile phone, but I wouldn't want to waste my time doing that with their landline, because they're probably not home. Or if it's a person who lives with their parents, then a mobile number is going to be very different from a landline number. These are consequences of the technology; the differences between mobile and landline phones cannot be made transparent simply by not clearly distinguishing them.

Still, I suppose we're used to what we get.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[JacobO]

I didn't understand it when I moved to Canada, but having thought about it, it now makes sense to me. You pay to receive a cellular call because you are paying for airtime and not the call. Conversely, when you make a call, if it is a local call, the call is free, but the airtime still costs. This better reflects the provider's cost to provide the service - you're paying while you're tying up the channel.

It also hints at the historical system of giving out phone numbers to mobile phones that are tied to particular geographical locations (or rate zones.) In many places, all mobile phones using a carrier share the same area code, wherever they are.

I had no idea that I might be paying to receive text messages, I should check that!

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Invidious]

This is absurd. Landline systems are obsolete. Yes! Obsolete! I live in Finland and I must say that there are no practical reasons for this 'equality'.

The landline -- good old copper-pair wiring -- is not obsolete. Sure, your cellphone is convenient, and possibly cheaper. But what happens when something happens that wipes out the transmission network? What happens if you lose power for a week and you only had a couple bars of battery left when the power goes?

The reason that landlines aren't obsolete is dependability. You practically never lose phone service to a real copper landline unless a tree's come down in your neighborhood -- and even then, the lines may work. The land-line network practically never gets jammed from too much traffic. I've never had a dropped call. I can run a line and get service anywhere in my house, even the basement.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[mah!]

>buying a car radio and not being able to receive signals of 1/2 of the stations, or losing radio signal in your radio where the car on your right receives the same program because it's coming from another provider... great thing, incompatible 'standards' eh?

Sounds a bit like satellite radio to me.

uh... I have no experience with it - is satellite radio that bad?

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Kadin2048]

Um, but in order for this transition to occur -- for people to want to drop their landlines and adopt cellphones -- you need (at least in the U.S., I can't speak for people's preferences in Finland) number portability. People don't want to give up phone numbers that they may have had for decades, and have printed on all sorts of business materials, or that everyone is familiar with.

I know some businesses (and I'm sure there are older residents, too) with numbers that have been the same -- at least in the trailing digits -- since the introduction of direct-dial. People don't want to give that up; if that's the cost of moving to a cellphone, a lot of people are just not going to be interested, because they're going to build in the cost of "renting" that number by paying for a POTS line and forwarding it. (Hell, in my area people still write phone numbers with five digits, because the first two digits are well-known and implied. If you have to write the full seven, you're an outsider and not to be trusted, and if you have the full ten...well, the Interstate's that way, why don't you get right back on it? I've been to other places where people give four digits because there's only one exchange for the whole town/city.)

So while I'm with you, at least to some degree, about cellphones eventually bringing about the demise of POTS, it's really the number portability that has let people really cut ties. Without that, I know many people who'd still be using copper lines.

Wow, an article about nothing...

[jberryman]

it's like Seinfeld, but instead of being funny it's mind-numbingly retarded. C'mon Slashdot, wasn't there any Apple nooze in the queue? I'd rather read about the iToaster than this crap.

Re:Wow, an article about nothing...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's like Seinfeld, but instead of being funny it's mind-numbingly retarded. So... just like seinfeld.

Zonk, what the hell are you doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you posting "new" stories in the past? Is it because you screwed up and didn't post any stories for 10 hours or so?

The article is too long, here's the summary...

[RuBLed]

For peculiar business reasons, Americans n Canadians hv historically paid 2 receive txt messages (although much of Canada has shifted away from this). This creates a stilted social dynamic whereby a friend forces u 2 pay $.10 (o use up a precious token msg in yr plan) simply by deciding 2 send u something. You hv n choice. There's n blocking, n opt-out. Direct 2 jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Needless 2 say, this alters d culture of txtin. From d getgo, Americans hv bn vri cautious about txtin. To b on d safe side, many Americans did not add txtin 2 their plan so sending a txt msg was often futile cuz it was never clear if a txt msg would b received by d fone in question o just disappear into d ether. Slowly, mob users figured out who had SMS n who didn't, but they were still super cautious about sending messages. It just felt rude, o wrong, o risky. Teens, of course, never had this filter. They were perfectly happy 2 txt. So much so that their parents refused 2 get them plans that supported it cuz, not surprisingly, there were all sorts of horror stories about teens who had texted up $700 fone bills. Sure enough, every family that I spoke w told me their version of d horror story n. In d U.S., we don't hv pay-as-u-go so going ova minutes o texts just gets added 2 yr monthly bill. If u're not careful, that bill cn get mighty costly. Unable 2 declare a max cost upfront, parents hv bn tremendously wary of teen txtin simply for economic costs (although d occasional predator o cheating-in-school scare story does surface). Slowly, things hv turned around, primarily w d introduction of cheap all-u-cn-eat txt messaging plans (n those that r so ridiculously high that it's hard 2 go ova). Once d barrier 2 participation s dropped, sending n receiving txt messages switches from bn potentially traumatic 2 outright fun. What a difference those plans make in user practice. The brick leash suddenly turns into an extension of d thumb for negotiating full-time intimate communities. I'm fascinated by how U.S. teens build intricate models of which f? r available via mob n which aren't. Teens know who s on wot plan, who cn b called after 7PM, who cn b called after 9PM, who cn receive texts, who s ova their txtin for d month, etc. It's part of their mental model of their social network n knowing this s a core exchange of friendship. Psychologically, all-u-cn-eat plans change everything. Rather than having 2 mentally calculate d number of texts sent n received (cuz d phones rarely do it for u n d carriers like 2 make that info obscure), a floodgate of opportunities s suddenly opened. The weights r lifted n freedom reigns. The result? Zero 2 a thousand txt messages in under a month! Those on all-u-cn-eat plans go hog wild. Every mundane thought s transmitted n d phones go buzz buzz buzz. Those w restrictive plans r treated w caution, left out of d fluid communication flow n brought in for more practical o content-filled purposes (o by sig others who ignore these norms n face d ire of parents). All-u-cn-eat plans r still relatively rare in Europe. For that matter, plans r relatively rare (while pay-as-u-go options were introduced in d U.S. relatively l8 n r not nearly as common as monthly plans). When a European youth runs out of texts n cn't afford 2 top up, they simply don't txt. But they cn still receive texts w/o cost so they aren't actually kept out of d loop; they just hv 2 call 2 respond if they still hv minutes o borrow a friend's fone. What u c in Europe s a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. As d U.S. goes from 0 2 all-u-cn-eat in one foul swoop, American txtin culture s beginning 2 look quite different than wot exists in Europe. Whenever I walk into a T-Mobile n ask who goes ova their $10/1000 txt msg plan, d answer s uniform: "every teenager." Rather than averaging a relatively conservative number of texts per month (like 200), gluttonous teen America s already on route 2 thousands of texts per month. They txt like they IM, a practice mastered in middle school. Rather th

Re:The article is too long, here's the summary...

[Briareos]

tl; dr.

The researcher is !clue

[kenblakely]

Euro kids don't text after their free texts have run out? Please. People text in Europe the same way they breath: all the time. The thing about receiving textsbeing free is accurate tho: the result is SMS-spam.

Re:The researcher is !clue

[pipatron]

You mean receiving text messages for free leads to spam? How? Doesn't this mean that all the cost for sending goes to the spammer?

Re:The researcher is !clue

[deniable]

Spammers like to send you a message to call them back. They give you the number of a $50/min line. They started that crap in Australia and got smacked. They're now blitzing the TV with ads for ring-tones and other crap.

Re:The researcher is !clue

[novakreo]

Euro kids don't text after their free texts have run out? Please. People text in Europe the same way they breath: all the time. The thing about receiving textsbeing free is accurate tho: the result is SMS-spam. Funny, I live in a country where receiving SMS is free, and I've never received SMS spam. If anything, it seems like it'd be more likely in a place where the sender pays nothing.

Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Entropius]

A SMS message contains about a hundred bytes of non-time-critical data, which is a pittance compared to a tenth of a second of audio (which is time-critical, at least unless you ask T-Mobile).

SMS's put virtually no load at all on the network infrastructure. Surely some carrier could attract business with free unlimited messages, and it wouldn't cost them a thing.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats actually not true. SMS messages (at least in the GSM network, which is used mostly in Europe and Australia) are not sent on the same data channel used for voice, they are actually sent on a control data channel, which has much less bandwidth than the voice channel. It is still ridiculous that they cost as much as they do, but there is some reasoning behind it.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Cyberax]

Actually, no.

SMS messages use GSM control channels, not the main voice/data channels. Even worse, SMS messages compete for bandwidth with the other service messages (like 'make a call'). So too many SMS messages can easily crash operator's networks.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Bent Mind]

I never have understood paying for text messaging.

In my mind, I've been "Texting" for free since the early 90's, in the form of Instant Messaging. You could say since the early 80's if you count chat. I don't understand Cell Phone economics. Offer a service on the Internet, and consumers demand it for free. Offer a service on a cell phone, and consumers will pay you pennies a micro-second. To really sweeten the deal, most cell phones only offer a 12-key sub-micro keyboard that almost requires a toothpick to use and does require pressing keys multiple times to produce single basic characters.

No thanks. I'll stick to instant messaging and chat, along with a full-sized keyboard, for the affordable price of "Free"*.

*I do pay a basic connection fee (flat-fee based on number of bits available to down/upload per second, otherwise known as connection speed) to the Internet. However, this goes to my ISP, not to the message service.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[NickNameCreateAccoun]

No load? Please do visit a european country on new years eve, basically all service is out between 23.30-01.00 Just because of the "no load" sms.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[wizardforce]

ok then why bother having them in two seperate channels when you can just use a very high frequency low amplitude signal and vary signal strength to represent 0's and 1's to send the texts while not producing any human audible interference? The idea is to use a signal that is too high a frequency to be audible by humans and vary the frequency like FM to avoid data loss from any interference.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[deniable]

Your alternative requires you to be in a fixed location, unless your using a mobile phone as a modem. In that case, the billing is far worse.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[deniable]

You want to put digital data on an audio carrier that is then digitized? Depending on your carrier, digital phone is encoded at, IIRC, ~8-16 kbps. The other part of the equation is the same people use UDP instead of TCP. You send a packet instead of taking the time to handle a complete connection.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Bent Mind]

Your alternative requires you to be in a fixed location Yes and no. I generally can't use WiFi while driving. I can't really imagine people texting while driving, though I hear that a lot do try to kill themselves in this manor. However, I rarely have a problem getting a connection once I'm at my destination. As a bonus, unless I'm at home, WiFi really is free.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[hcmtnbiker]

No load? Please do visit a european country on new years eve, basically all service is out between 23.30-01.00 Just because of the "no load" sms.

I would be very surprised if it was out because of texting alone. Just two seconds of thinking tells you that a plain text message, usually less then 255 characters is a much smaller payload then any voice conversation. If it is the SMS however, its not the payload of the messages that is hurting the system its the constant hammering of the tower by very small messages, much like how bittorrent can freak out routers, not because of a high payload, but because of excessive connections that the tower just plain cannot handle. A cell phone tower can only handle a certain number of simultaneous connections, if you just get enough people with powered on cell phones you can knock out a tower, I've seen this for events in small towns where the number of people is multiple times what it normally is.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

They tried this in Finland.. Unlimited SMS was unlimited for a few months, before some teens sent over 3000 messages a month. then it was limited to 1000 sms per month.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[SeaFox]

SMS's put virtually no load at all on the network infrastructure. Surely some carrier could attract business with free unlimited messages, and it wouldn't cost them a thing.

.Logic_Error

With unlimited texting, there's much less incentive to call someone and speak to them, hence why do I need a 1000 min cellphone plan then, the much cheaper 250 minute one would be fine.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[bladesjester]

I can't really imagine people texting while driving, though I hear that a lot do try to kill themselves in this manor.

Many parts of Europe are different from the US in that most people use public transit. You also have to consider that, in a car containing more than one person, not everyone is driving.

Those facts make messaging while being in transit a whole lot more appealing and a lot less dangerous.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Velorium]

To be honest, the only carrier in the U.S. I've seen do this is Sprint, at least at present time.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[stivi]

SMS's put virtually no load at all on the network infrastructure For the most of the year you are right, however a mobile phone operator will not agree with you on 24th-25th of December and on the New Year... sometimes the load leads to temporary DOS.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Buran]

"In this manor"?

It was Col. Mustard, with the cell phone, in the parlor.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[lazy_playboy]

Believe it. At 00:00 01/01, in Europe everyone texts everyone and the resulting 2 hour mobile outage is a right pain in the arse.
As many others have said, SMS uses the control channel which has much less bandwidth and chokes very easily, and also affects voice call functions, even if there's plently of bandwidth free on the voice channel.

SMS wasn't designed for the daily usage that we're seeing today - it was more of a 'hmmm, we'll add this function in as an after thought, but no one's really gonna use it much, are they?'

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

ISTR that initially in the UK, text messages were offered completely free and unlimited.
Then someone tried running slip over text for a free wireless connection between two machines...

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[xpiotr]

It depends on the implementation.
There is no Quality of Service connected to sending SMS,
so if there is a flood of SMS coming,
the operator normally caches them and send them at a conveniant time.
Or just throw them, since the is no QoS connected.

A little like when the postman gets tired of carrying your letters and throws some of them.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Cyberax]

In any case, SMS messages are significant burden for operators. So operators naturally want to limit the flow of messages.

At least because nobody would be using SMS if operators were throwing 90% of messages or delaying them for a few days.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Poromenos1]

I don't know what that sounds like to you, but it sounds like a great idea to me!

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Chutulu]

here in Portugal every year a new record is broken. Millions of SMS are sent just between 23.45 and 00.15. On the 1st of January it is always news on the TV the numbers of SMS sent. Yeah and it's pretty much difficult to make a call at that time.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

phone's tend to sample at a rate of about 4hz so they can't carry sounds which aren't audible to humans. Why not just multiplex the data into the voice data stream ooohhh like GPRS does.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Tim Browse]

Heh. That is slightly amusing - are you American? It was the assumption that if you're not at home/in the office, you must be in a car that gave it away. In the UK, at least, people don't text while driving (although they do talk, even though it's illegal now). But people will text when at home, work, in a cafe, in a shop, on the street, on a bus, in a taxi, on a train, etc.

I guess it's just a cultural thing - the US seems not to use text much (although that's changing with various new charge plans). In Europe, etc, texting is considered...well, it's not considered. It's a nothing. It's a commodity. It's like water. Want to tell someone something? Send them a message.

I was once with some friends (British, American, and a Brit living in the US), trying to find a restaurant in London. One of us went off up the street to look along the other streets at a crossroads. He found it, then texted us (or possibly called us) to tell us. He was only a hundred or two yards away, but it surprised the US contingent that he would use it like that. For the UK people, it was completely natural, and we didn't even think about it until they pointed it out.

Maybe it is just the money - my parents grew up in a time when using the phone was relatively expensive. A few years back, when before they got broadband, my Dad asked me to check his modem settings, as sometimes it didn't hang up after he'd finished using the internet, and sometimes it would run for 30 minutes or an hour before he noticed. I knew what time of day he used the internet, so did some mental arithmetic, and said, "Yeah, I mean that could cost you up to 50 pence!" as a joke. His reply: "Exactly!" So it takes a while to change that ingrained almost unconscious feeling. Having said that, my parents are now on broadband, and get more free minutes per month on their phone than I use in a year, and use their mobiles like water, so things can change :-)

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[raynet]

One part of the cost comes from SMS gateways which happen to be (atleast some years back when I played with them) rather expensive. The license cost per year was outrageus and was based on how many messages per second you wanted to be able to deliver.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Entropius]

How are SMS messages a significant burden?

It's an absolutely trivial amount of data compared to a phone call.

If a one-off transmission at low priority of a few hundred bytes is a significant burden, then it's implemented wrongly.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Sloppy]

Ah, so the implementation is brain-damaged.

Yet another reason to get away from the legacy phone systems. Just give us a packet-switched network, and we'll come up with apps that don't suck. Text should just be PGPed Jabber, QOSed to reflect its tolerance for high latency.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Cyberax]

You can have it, no problem. For example, MMS use general data channels.

But it's much less popular.

Why does bottled water cost much anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they're greedy assholes, that's why.

Re:Why does bottled water cost much anyway?

[slimey_limey]

Just you wait until I start my own phone company. Then I'll have free unlimited texts, and where will YOU be? That's right.

Re:Why does bottled water cost much anyway?

[deniable]

echo evian | rev

or what's evian backwards?

Mobile numbers have a distinct prefix here!

[_merlin]

In most countries you can tell whether a call is to a mobile or not from the number, and you can decide whether you want to pay to call a mobile. For example in Australia, mobile numbers start with 04, and in China mobile numbers start with 13. If a non-mobile number is forwarded to a mobile number, the owner of the forwarded number pays the mobile call rate (as opposed to the caller or the receiver).

Re:Mobile numbers have a distinct prefix here!

[RowanS]

And also most mobile phone tariffs in Australia now charge the same rate to call a mobile or fixed line anywhere in the country, so it doesn't really matter.

Re:Mobile numbers have a distinct prefix here!

[jamar0303]

Actually, there are certain cellphone numbers in China that look the same as landline numbers. These are PHS phones, and as such are charged the same as landline calls. They're cheaper too (I believe there's some kind of unlimited calling plan for them for about $15-20). They only work in their home city, though- that's how they get treated as landlines.

Re:Mobile numbers have a distinct prefix here!

[Chris Pimlott]

It matters a hell of a lot if you call a mobile from a land line. Calling a local land line is 30c for unlimited time. Calling a mobile is 40c a minute. Ridiculous! Granted, I'm on the cheapest plan but even on Telstra's highest premium plan charges 37c a minute for non-Telstra mobile numbers. Plus a 39c connection fee.

I can get a calling card for dozens of countries for less than 1c a minute, so why in the world are these calls so expensive?

Re:Mobile numbers have a distinct prefix here!

[heffeque]

Wow... so I guess that Slovenian cell phone tariffs are the cheapest in the world or something. I'm an Erasmus in Maribor and I'm paying with a prepaid SIM less than I do with a contract SIM back in Spain :-S
Although when I come back to Spain I'll change my operator that offers calls inside the network for free and outside for 0.12 euros per minute (charged by the seconds used) and an unlimited data plan for 1.2 euros a day (you don't pay anything if you don't use internet). Oh and as all European countries tariffs: incoming calls and SMSs are free so prices compared to the ones in the US should be considered as half of what they appear there.

Re:Mobile numbers have a distinct prefix here!

[Echnin]

But in China you pay to receive too (China Telecom Beijing)... well actually you don't have to; 10 kuai a month lets me receive up to something like 300 or 500 minutes a month...

"Internet Sociologist"

[gowen]

Internet Sociologist? That's not a real job.

Re:"Internet Sociologist"

[DigiShaman]

Bet they get paid more than you do (and me for that matter). After all, they have a fancy title. That's all you need to make the big bucks.

Re:"Internet Sociologist"

[Seumas]

Not only isn't it a job, but it's an oxymoron.

Re:"Internet Sociologist"

[Workaphobia]

'Course it's a job. They're the ones responsible for maintaining the Wikipedia article about Slashdot, particularly its subculture... You insensitive clod.

Paying to receive

[Techman83]

Man, US Telco's really have their customers by the balls. Double dipping and then some! I can't recall a time where in Australia you had to pay to receive, I do recall not being able to send via prepaid, but that was introduced about 12 months after prepaid sims became available.

You mean receiving text messages for free leads to

[kenblakely]

Sending a text costs the same whether it's read or not, so you won't pay to send a lotta text msg if you know they won't get read, right?

Don't have to pay in Australia

[sc0ob5]

I haven't RTFA but you don't have to pay to receive SMS's in Australia so I guess that would mean we are like Europe. I didn't realise that people actually paid to receive SMS's, that's like paying twice.

Whoever came up with texting...

[HungWeiLo]

...is a frickin marketing genius. He/she's convinced telecom customers to actually pay money to use much, much less of the bandwidth that they're already paying for.

Re:Whoever came up with texting...

[Anonymous Coward]

No genius there. It was a Finnish mobile network engineer who proposed it for maintenance purposes. Nobody really planned that it would be a big hit.

Re:Whoever came up with texting...

[MonoSynth]

As far as I know, sms is just an accidental feature. A simple way for the provider to inform their customers, but it became popular when people discovered that they could send messages to each other too. In the beginning, sms was free here in the Netherlands (afaik).

Re:Whoever came up with texting...

[sssssss27]

I use text messaging all the time. There are some instances where sending a text message is better than calling. If you are in a noisy place, talking to more than one person at a time, short messages, things that need to be remembered, etc.

free in europe

[nerdyalien]

I have a friend in prague. Instead of texting from my phone, I just go to the VODAFONE web site, where I can send, pretty much e-mail long text messages for no charge at all. This is cool... virtually.. you don't have to bother about credit limits, if you run out, you can go online and send SMS in an emergency. I also find it ridiculous to charge all the incoming stuff. Come on... its like early days in Stamp Postage, where receiver should pay the stamp charges... which discouraged people and made it a key factor for general public to refrain using postal system.

Re:free in europe

[Virgil Tibbs]

the same is ture in the US. your providor will typically provide a WWW gate where you can send SMS's. sometimes you can even email sms. In the uk, websites such as adsar.co.uk and cbfsms.com prevail however, o2.co.uk provides user 10 free texts/month

"comfortable but not excessive"

[Per Abrahamsen]

I guess that is an accurate description if "comfortable but not excessive" means that you stop sms'ing somewhere in the interval after your fingers start to bleed, but before you hit the bone.

But I'd say pre-teens sms even more than teens.

Re:"comfortable but not excessive"

[Seumas]

Anyone stupid enough to give a pre-teen (or a teen for that matter) a cell phone deserves to be charged through the nose for their idiocy, anyway. You might as well just hand over your Visa card to your third grader.

LW4

[Amphetam1ne]

Am I the only person that's got Chris Rock and Joe Pesci's conversation about cellphones from Lethal Weapon 4 playing in there head right now?

nothing geeky about 'texting'

[CranberryKing]

Texting is about the stupidest application to 'revolutionize' communications. With all the technology available today people get excited about the ability to send text to mobile devices. Yawwwnnnn.. This 'news' is not for nerds, it's about pricing and consumer electronics.

Re:nothing geeky about 'texting'

[Vouchers]

Using texting as a mobile version of instant messaging seems kind of stupid, but there are some uses of texting/SMS that make sense. Software like Google Calendar can text message you calendar reminders. It looks like some banks are starting to use them to send warnings of low account balance or other problems. This could be very handy for people that are holiday shopping (or gambling) so that they don't inadvertently overdraw their account. SMS is being used elsewhere for warning about terror attacks or tsunamis. Although some problems exist (such as causing mass panic when hoax messages are sent out), this seems like a good use of SMS.

Texting isn't inherently stupid, it's just the way that people are using it that is.

Mobile Operators Must Die!

[pandrijeczko]

The cellular companies have been ripping people off for years, good riddance to the lot of them when public wireless access and SIP servers are prevalent enough for everyone to use IP rather than cellular.

And as for my mobile phone, I rarely text on it as it's a tool for people to get hold of me if they have a good reason to or vice versa - it is NOT a device that props of any lack of self esteem on my part because of being so terrified of missing out on anything my friends or family are doing that I have to be in constant contact with them all nattering/texting about total banalities.

Grow up, people! Look up from your 2 inch square screens for a few minutes and enjoy REAL LIFE!

In the Philippines, it's virtually free

[sharksfin]

One relatively new carrier in the Philippines offers unlimited texting within its network for up to 30 days, for 150 pesos (that's about $3.50). This also comes with 4 hours of free calls.

To keep up, the larger carriers are offering X free text messages for every Y pesos the subscriber loads to his/her account. No free calls, though.

I guess this is why the country remains as the so-called texting capital of the world -- the norm is to use your phone to text, even for life or death situations. It's like everyone here forgets that the primary function of a phone is to make calls.

Japan

[glasspanic]

In Japan you send emails to each other on your phone - no one uses SMS. I didn't have a look into plans much because I was only there for a month or two, but I think I was only paying about 1 cent per email.

Re:Japan

[DDLKermit007]

Unrelated, but do you happen to know any rental companies that don't rake you over the coals on cellphone plans in Japan by chance? I had a phone rental over the summer for a month, and the phone rental ended up costing almost as much as my plane tickets (what I get for leaving it up to an incompetent friend who'd been a bunch of times and supposedly "knew" what they were doing). I'm doing a 3 month excursion this Summer, and have no desire to deal with that highway robbery pricing scheme again.

Re:Japan

[jamar0303]

Technically, their "e-mail" is essentially MMS. That's still incredibly cheap, considering what the Japanese can do with it. Some pressure on American providers is needed to make this happen for America.

Re:Japan

[glasspanic]

The people I was staying with worked for a Telecom company so they set it up for me. Ended up costing $100 or $200 but it was well worth it for the opporunities it unlocked and the train timetable thingy :) Granted I did get stung a bit by the cancellation fee and some other stupid fees but, compared to a friend who brought a prepaid phone which barely did anything (I think you could make calls and send SMS) I think I did pretty well. Short term isn't so good, but if you are on a long(ish) term contract you don't get ripped off too much (and, as mentioned, it's definitely worth it for the social aspects etc it opens up)

In Soviet Europe...

[Opportunist]

Europe is vastly different from the US. I noticed that when I went to the US for an extended time and had to get a cellphone.

First of all, the idea of paying to receive anything is completely alien here. There is simply no way you could even sell that here. People would fear that their friends start adding to their bills. Not to mention that people here are already afraid of being ripped off by someone abusing the phone system (you'd be surprised how many ask in various boards what they should do when getting a call from a number they don't know and whether that's a rip off).

What we're used to is metered phones, though. There has never been a time of unlimited and free local calls. Actually what most people are used to from their land lines which made it into the cell market is a monthly basic provider fee and paying by the minute (or by the text message sent). Most plans work that way.

Plans that include "free" minutes (which are rather prepaid, actually) are still rare and are currently entering the mainstream market. What you do have is various plans that offer a certain monthly fee and different rates to different other providers and foreign calls (with Europe being divided into many small countries, international plans actually play a role).

In general, the market is anything but transparent. Here you pay a high monthly fee and call free to the same provider and another one and landlines, there you have one that offers no monthly fee but high minute rates... In general, it takes a lot of work to actually get an even cursory overview.

Re:In Soviet Europe...

[BeeRockxs]

There has never been a time of unlimited and free local calls. Actually what most people are used to from their land lines which made it into the cell market is a monthly basic provider fee and paying by the minute (or by the text message sent). Most plans work that way. At least in Germany, that's rapidly changing. Nowadays, almost every new contract has free landline calling in all of Germany for a flat fee, and only mobile is pay-per-minute.

Re:In Soviet Europe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plans that include "free" minutes (which are rather prepaid, actually) are still rare and are currently entering the mainstream market. What you do have is various plans that offer a certain monthly fee and different rates to different other providers and foreign calls (with Europe being divided into many small countries, international plans actually play a role).

What are you talking about? I've had inclusive minutes as part of my price plan in the UK since 1996. When I first got a mobile. For all I know they were doing them even before that...

Re:In Soviet Europe...

[derfla8]

I've noticed that in the past two years I've been getting messages that go straight to my voicemail that are advertisements for crap I don't want. I also started getting the odd SMS spam here and there. Worse are when a telemarketer or fax machine dials my cellphone in Canada. For the consumer, this is a complete rip off. I never had these problems with my phone in the Netherlands because someone would have to pay for that and not me.

If someone really wants to talk to me, they should pay for it. That would keep random noise down.

"Huh? That's retarded."

[SharpFang]

Whenever any of my european friends hears americans pay for incoming SMS or calls, they just open their eyes wide in amazement. "Huh? That's retarded. So I send you 100 SMS using a WWW gateway and you have to pay for them?"

Yeah. WWW gateways where you can send SMS for free. Actually getting an EXTRA CREDIT for RECEIVING calls - 2 minutes of incoming call gives you 1 minute of outgoung call extra in some plans. When your prepaid card runs out of credit, you can receive calls and SMS for a year without paying any extra. Then buy a $10 worth of calling credit and you have another year of incoming calls.

There's one situation when you pay for incoming calls. Roaming - you're in a different country, then you pay for calls from your home country. But the method is simple: prepaid starters are usually cheaper than prepaid recharges. Just remove the SIM-lock before leaving, then the first thing you do while there: buy a local pre-paid, put your own SIM in the wallet, put the pre-paid in the phone, send SMS with your number to all your friends. International SMS between networks native to respective countries count the same as local SMS.

Cheap unlimited data in Europe

[jholster]

More and more phones are data-enabled, but only the techno-elite are going to add such ridiculously costly plans. (And what on earth can you do with only 4MB?) It's pretty clear that the carriers do not actually want you to use data. The story is even scarier in Europe with no unlimited options. Not true. I pay 10 eur per month for unlimited 384 kbps 3G data in Finland. Even unlimited 2 Mbps costs no more than ~30 eur per month. Pretty cheap I think, and this is common price level in Finland.

Re:Cheap unlimited data in Europe

[delt0r]

You forget on /. Europe is a country. Well it seems that way, people in the US of A seem to forget that we are a lot of very very different countries.

Back OT:
Unfortunately it is true for Austria. However contracts are so cheap and even prepay is really cheap anyway. 20Eu gets me by for 2+months and I'm calling/txting all the time.

Re:Cheap unlimited data in Europe

[Poromenos1]

Well, mr. "I live next to the Nokia factory and my stuff is cheap"! In Greece it's like 30 eur for 300 MB and then it's some part of your soul per extra MB. If you aren't signed up for that plan, it's 10 eur/MB, I think. Everyone is like "data? what?" Even if you know how to do it, it's very expensive. Whenever I access the internet from my mobile I pray "oh please don't let that email have an attachment, please please".

So yeah, you're the happy exception, I think :(

Re:Cheap unlimited data in Europe

[AncientPC]

Unlimited data and text (500min anytime, nights start at 7) with Sprint starting for $30 / month:
http://www.sprint.com/sero
http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/680568/

Re:Cheap unlimited data in Europe

[mcfedr]

also simlar in the uk, i would pay about £5-10 a month for unlimited 3g, but as it is i get free skype, msn messenger and ebay...
the idea of paying to recieve is compleatly insane, it seems to be all aload of historical stuff which has no relevance anymore, like the way data used to £5 per mb, and now its unlimited, 3g...
the trouble with big instustry, prob made worse by big country, is its slow moving, people dont understand the real costs and so the companys are slow to upgrade...

s/involved/evolved/

[Kadin2048]

Ugh...slay me.

That's "evolved" not "involved." In my defense, I plead 4AM.

US Cellular?

[5of0]

I don't know about the rest of the providers, but my US provider (US Cellular) has free incoming everything - texts, phone calls, picture messages - by default on all its plans. And unlimited outgoing texting is $15 a month (picture messaging is something extra). I guess they're the odd ones out?

In Ireland

[wobbelyheadbob]

everyone texts... none of the providers charge you for reciving anything and my provider (meteor) lets me text other people with meteor phones for free.. to other networks its 7c per message sent!

Re:In Ireland

[thegux]

Yeah - in Ireland, most (younger) people are on Meteor - and we all get free texts to each other. All of my friends are on Meteor, so we text each other all the time.

Has anyone mentioned the cost

[spacec0w]

of calling mobiles in Europe from landlines or VOIP services? My Swedish (ex) girlfriend came with me to California one time and couldn't believe that you had to pay to receive calls when she was giving my cell number to her mom. I had to concede that it is pretty ridiculous, since you can easily get screwed from spam, etc with SMS. But, my experience has been generally that calling cell phones in Europe is incredidly expensive (almost 30 cents a minute to call a Spanish cell from Skype) while the same price in the US as to call a landline (2 cents a minute or whatever they charge now). Also, might I add that landlines with inluded unlimited local calling makes calling cell phones free for the caller at least. Now, with unlimited long-distance and other developments the idea of local vs long distance is another issue... but at least you could call someone with the same area code for free no matter where the cell phone user is.

Re:Has anyone mentioned the cost

[Anonymous Coward]

30 cents per minute sounds quite expensive. In Finland I pay less than 4 cents per minute calling from my GSM phone to another GSM phone or landline. And for many landlines are more expensive option than GSM phone.

NANP sucks big floppy donkey...

[the grace of R'hllor]

... ears.

Why? Two main reasons:
- The NANP breaks the idea of "one nation, one country calling code". You can not easily tell, from a number, whether you're calling Puerto Rico (probably just +1787, but maybe they'll get a new range) or Montreal.
- NANP has no provisions for determining whether a number is mobile or not; all numbers are geographically based. Most advanced countries *do* make the distinction.

It's the area codes

[daBass]

One of the issues is that in most of the world, mobile number start with a specific prefix (06 in .nl, 04 in .au, 07 in .uk and so on) but in the US they do not. Instead, your number starts with the area code of the area (or close to) where you bought the phone and callers can not tell the difference between a landline (cheap to call) and a mobile (expensive to call) like you can elsewhere.

Taking that into account, it starts to make sense that if you are the one who decided to be on an expensive network, you pay the difference and the person calling you only pays the normal rate to your cell phone's area code.

EH??

[Piranhaa]

Not too sure about the US, but since I've ever used a cellphone up in Canuck-land we haven't EVER had to pay to recieve text messages... We pay to receive calls (unless we have an unlimited incoming plan - only a few of these). Not sure where the author got his information from.

Europhilic Summarizer...

[zippthorne]

What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive.

Oh, how convenient for them that even their shortcomings make them superior.

Rubbish - all major networks offer unlimited texts

[norfolkboy]

... at least, all the UK ones do.

Since the owners of the UK networks (Vodafone, o2, three, Orange, T-mobile) run networks in most other European countries.... I'd be very surprised if there weren't similar plans in the rest of the EU to as in the UK

Re:You mean receiving text messages for free leads

[Anonymous Coward]

What the FLYING fsck?!?!#&*%(@

Excessive

[DigiAngel]

What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. Americans are nothing if not excessive.

I pay to send

[blackjackshellac]

I don't pay anything to recieve texts.

Exchange

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

From the article:

I'm fascinated by how U.S. teens build intricate models of which friends are available via mobile and which aren't. Teens know who is on what plan, who can be called after 7PM, who can be called after 9PM, who can receive texts, who is over their texting for the month, etc. Once one German dude told me that mobile phone changed his hanging-out habits such that he meets with friends depending on the mobile phone carrier/contract they have.

The next sentence of the article says:

It's part of their mental model of their social network and knowing this is a core exchange of friendship.

INBD

[Anonymous Coward]

Who have you been texting fifty times a day?

You pay to receive?

[thatblackguy]

I look at the prices on your cell phone there in the US and go WTF. On average you get that loads cheaper than here in India but then I see all the caveats and wonder if that's really worth a lower one time price. You get cellphones that actively work to monopolise a certain provider, here's looking at you Apple. You pay to receive sms' which I've never heard of. Hell, here you can even get a plan where you a pay an amount and get a lifetime of incoming calls and sms. You can't make calls except to good ol' 112 but no more phone bills. Our government is pretty damn good with all this stuff actually. We've got caps on the maximum they can charge, we're even working on a law that makes it mandatory for phone companies to keep the numbers the same when you switch companies. Note: WHEN. I've been used to sim cards since forever, I didn't know things like 2 year lock-ins even existed. We have a good ol' company that sells cdma phones whose numbers you can't change but people get those for either theft prevention (where not being able to change the number is a feature) or because they're dirt cheap. No decent phone would lock you to a vendor not even the competing cheap ones. All this regulation while there are about 5 major service providers, each competing to go below the prices of the others while keeping their services good. Then again, one of them just got bought out by Vodaphone so perhaps we'll get a taste of all that soon :)

Txting has become.. needed.

[lordmage]

It scares me. I tried to run my various softball teams via Email but the players didnt have computers or couldnt email. They all seem to have Texting now. Ntelos is free to rcv texts so a lot of my players are on it. I have unlimited now cause I will be sending out 10-20 texts at a time. THAT is a lot more efficient. Txting takes over where email can't. MASS COMMUNICATION.

Re:First post?? T9... ughhhh...

[davidsyes]

T9 just pisses me OFF. I can't stand how my phone's got a knack for defaulting to (and STAYING with) that shitty T9 that can't predict a DAMN about what *I* have to type. It just ends up with jibberish, and I *WISH* I could remove the shit once and for all from the interface. Anyone here from Sprint have anything to do with firmware/software upgrades? Please, remove the shit, or give us an option to remove it. It's so irritating that it makes me want to got bitch-slap whomever signed off on it. For someone with multi-thousands of words or word combinations in vocabulary, T9 is a worthless piece of shit. I tend to use whole words often, but lately have begun to just abbreviate if it is non-confusing. That is how fast some brains can work. (I chickened out of the Spelling Bee when I was in the 4th grad, did very well in vocabulary, spelling, grammar... and don't need nor care for any word/text predictors...)

Pay to Re'x

[AP31R0N]

Do we pay to receive because when i answer my phone i'm making MY NETWORK do something, and when you call me you are making YOUR NETWORK do something. The money you pay to call me doesn't get around to my network.

Is this an accurate model?

++++
i ship a package to you. i pay FedEx to pick up the package. FedEx can take the package only so close to you, because UPS owns the roads to your house. FedEx doesn't pay UPS to deliver the package, so UPS charges you to get the package that last few miles.
++++

Or do they charge to receive because they have us by the short and curlies?

Personally, i'd rather do away with FedEx and UPS and just have a public service. But that means no dividends, so that idea will be received like a loud fart at a funeral. People also seem to think that competition means lower prices and better service. How's that working out for us? What is the cheapest plan you can get these days. 45$ a month? Remember kids: Sprint's profit = how much they over charged you and how much service they weaseled out of giving you so they could give more money to people who already have more than you. Grumble grumble bourgeoisie grumble.

Can i please have a BASIC cheap service? i make about 7 calls a week, most of which are "Are you ready to go home?". i send maybe 3 text messages a month. My current plan has accumulated over 10,000 roll over minutes. Money shat down the drain. Pay as you go plans suck because if you don't buy a new card every month (which is little different that a standard plan) you LOSE YOUR NUMBER. So i'd have to change phone numbers several times a year. i'm not a 13 year old girl, i prolly don't talk 5000 minutes a month in PERSON let alone on the phone.