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.

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

[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

[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.

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

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: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.

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.