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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.
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.
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.
"Sue a company because I don't like the pricing on its voluntary plan?"
No, sue them all because they are in breach of competition laws by clearly using price fixing as a method of hiking profits above what fair competition would yield.