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OMG Did U C What U R Paying 4 Texting?
theodp writes "If you thought gas prices were rising too quickly, writes CNET's Marguerite Reardon, check out what's been happening to text messaging. Since 2005, rates to send and receive text messages on all four major carrier networks have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents per message. If the same pricing was applied on a per-byte basis to a single MP3 song download, it would set you back almost $24,000 according to one estimate. So why are carriers gouging their customers so? Because they can, concludes Reardon."
Most people who are serious about texting have unlimited plans, at least in the U.S. I'm not sure how much they cost but say $5/month on top of your regular contract, even 100 text messages is 5 cents a piece.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Maybe these prices will help drive the American consumer away from their opulent sport utility text messages to something a little more environmentally sustainable.
You'd think one of the wireless carriers would be able to differentiate themselves in the market and make a killing off selling 10 cent text messages. (That is, people would change to their service when possible because they're half the price of anyone else, and 10 cents for a text message is still a huge profit.) Do I just not understand the market dynamics, or could this be a case of price fixing?
In India the cost of texting is as little as 80paisa. i.e 0.80 INR. Now calculate the difference and make your new calculations on it.. Why do you guys spend so much then. Sue the companies that charge you so much for something which costs next to nothing.
Pretty much the same as gas...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
There should be a class action suit over this.
Why? No-one is forced to spend their money on text messages. Truth is the networks charge what they do because people are willing to pay it. People simply don't care about the bytes to dollar/euro/pound; ratio. For example, the last four messages I received from my brother contained a total of about 25 characters, 8 of which were exclamation marks.
If usage drops, then prices will follow, but that doesn't look like happening soon.
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
Price is the intersection of supply and demand curves. The US carriers charge what they do because people are willing to pay those prices. If you don't like the pricing, don't text. If enough people vote the same way with their fingers, prices will drop.
Telcos can charge you 4-10-30-50 cents for a text message that costs them hundredths, thousandths of a cent to carry because they monopolize the network. If your phone could login to any radio network to which it can eletromagnetically connect, depending on which services and prices it provides, then the networks would compete for those connections.
Instead, you're locked in. If you want to switch in realtime, you have to pay prohibitive "roaming" fees that are arbitrary and extremely high - higher than even the ripoffs from the primary network. Switching your primary network requires "porting" your phone number, days or weeks of bureacratic "processing", and sometimes can't port, and breaks your old primary network's contract at great expense.
These constraints are all made-up for telcos to retain their old monopoly status with their existing customers. The exact same truths that forced open the wired networks are still true for the wireless networks, but the telcos have lobbied to make that much more expandable market into an "exception".
Note that this problem is more true in the US than in Europe and elsewhere. Foreign countries don't have as much contractual monopoly, but do have some residual technical fragmentation that is more of a basis for lockin, even though there's somewhat less lockin. But since their formerly more separate states (AKA "countries") had separate telcos that compete with each other, there's still some effort to keep whatever lockin they can, though there's less of it.
The US Congress should fix the laws to apply "universal access" to the radio networks as well as to the wired networks (including the Internet). Make these lockin contracts illegal, so they become the exception (merely to purchase rates even lower than the open market produces after competition, to pass along to consumers the savings telcos get from lower "churn" rates). We're a loooong way away from that kind of Congressional alliance with consumers instead of telcos. But we can get there, just as we got there with landlines after many years of fighting.
We just have to start by making the problem of telco monopoly privilege the conventional wisdom. 300M Americans whining about paying too much with no choice usually eventually has an effect.
--
make install -not war
If you don't think text messages are worth 15 or 20 cents each, then don't use them. (Yes, you can get your cell carrier to disable texting to your phone, you just have to yell at them for a while until they give you to a supervisor who can actually do it.)
I don't mind that the market will bear such high prices; what I mind is that there seems to be no competition on the part of the cell companies. Why would the price of SMS go UP when the cost of everything else related to cellphones has gone down? Compared to a few years ago, you can get more minutes, more features, better phones, etc. for the same or better prices... except SMS. Hell, I have unlimited web browsing on my cellphone, and it's $6 a month; unlimited SMS is $15 a month.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
No-one is forced to spend their money on text messages.
Not 100% true. If you have Cingular/ATT disable text messaging on your phone, they don't promise that you won't receive any text messages. And I'm not talking about ATT's own free text-spam, but rather texts from people you don't know that you still get charged for. I wouldn't be surprised if other carriers do that too.
I am not a crackpot.
I never understood why you would have to pay to receive a text-message. I'm from the Netherlands and here only the one who sends a message has to pay, receiving is free. As far as I know it is like that in every courty in Europe (but I didn't check them all). Where you come from, do you have to pay to get called too? Because if you don't, the whole thing doesn't make sense - a one second call has way more data-transfer than a 100-character text-message.
I don't get why US people put up with the receiver of a call or txt paying. It's absurd to me. Does the receiver of a letter pay? No. So why does the receiver of a call or txt pay??
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Because you'd get slaughtered by the incumbents - a price drop here, a refusal of peer agreement there and pretty soon you're out of business.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
AT&T Family unlimited texting plan ($30 covering five phones) ... Let's just call it 26,000 messages per month. 3000 / 26000 = $0.115 per message.
Layne
You're a couple decimal places off... you mean .115 cents per message, or $0.00115
This is why I don't understand complaints about text message prices. If actually use text messaging a decent amount, then yes, it is ridiculous to pay per message.
If you want cheaper text messages, then buy a plan that includes them (Verizon has a 250 message option for $5 = $0.02/message). If you want to send a single text message here or there, then you're going to pay a premium for using services that aren't part of your plan. I don't see how this could be considered unfair.
If the same pricing was applied on a per-byte basis to a single MP3 song download, it would set you back almost $24,000 according to one estimate.
Let's consider these same calculations on the $30 unlimited ATT plan. A single MP3 download would cost... $30. Let's just say if I'm planning on downloading MP3s using text messages I'm going to get an unlimited plan and save myself $23,970.