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??

[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??

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[bytesex]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

"Internet Sociologist"

[gowen]

Internet Sociologist? That's not a real job.

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.

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.

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?