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Senator Questions Rise In US Texting Prices
vimm writes "Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) has started an inquiry on the rising prices of text messaging (up 100% since 2005) that has occurred almost in sync with the consolidation of 6 major carriers down to 4. In a letter sent to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, Kohl said the increase 'does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages.'"
I used to work for one of the large telecommunications companies. 161 bytes plus a little bit of HTTP header overhead is nothing. Practically everything performed on today's cellphones is completed via HTTP commands - most are clear-text. Usually, the only thing NOT encrypted is the NAI of user of the phone.
It just doesn't ring true to me that text messages are eating up their bandwidth even if the scale of their customer base is increased with the next purchase of the next cell-co.
It's greed - plain and simple.
That's my 2 cents.
Quite right. And petrol going from $1.10/gallon to $4/gallon is no big deal either, it's only $2.90 worth of difference. There are more pressing issues than gas prices, like healthcare, crime etc.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Unfortunately, I'm sure we're all aware this is just a senator trying to make it look like he's rattling a few cages
Actually, afaic, Herb Kohl is one of the few good guys left in Congress. And fwiw, since he's got his own millions of bucks from the Kohl's department store chain, he doesn't need money from anybody. Got his own stash, thank you very much. So while I wouldn't deny that he's a publicity whore (duh! he's a politician!) I would say that it's a safe bet that, oddly enough, he's pushing this in part simply because he's disgusted with the telecom companies.
Now if only HE would run for president.
A man's gotta dream; ya know?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
In CDMA, the broadcast from one base-station is divided into many channels ... 1 pilot, 1 sync, 1-8 paging, and up to 61 traffic channels (per frequency channel). Ignoring the pilot and sync, which allow the cell phones to find and synchronize the the system, we have paging channels where the phones watch for messages from the base station letting them know what channel to go to for an incoming call, and traffic channels for those calls.
Into this system, text messaging was bolted on as an afterthought. These are short messages, so they get sent out on the paging channel, since it isn't worth the time and effort to set up a traffic channel, only to tear it down again 80ms later, after the message has been transmitted.
Then came unlimited text messaging plans, and teenagers. "Hi sue! How R U?" [send] "Gr8! Saw Bob at park." [send] "Really? What was he wearing?" [send] "The shirt you bought him!" [send] "Awesome!" [send]. All of a sudden, relatively speaking, the text messaging system volume overloaded the paging channel's regular traffic. Network areas which only ran a single paging channel, suddenly needed to assign more channels to paging. Ok, not a problem, the standard allowed for up to 8. But in areas where a lot of phones were in use already had multiple paging channels. These find themselves in running out of paging channel bandwidth, while large swaths of traffic channels are not in use.
The problem isn't that text isn't cheap to send. It is the standard and the system were developed for voice traffic, and a tiny fraction was reserved for short data messages. The use case of teenagers with unlimited text messaging wasn't considered. To change the standard, and the systems which employ the standard - such as to add more paging channels - will require new phones and/or software upgrades to all existing phones out there, or they'll suddenly not work. It isn't just a matter of upgrading software in the network base-stations.
will require new phones and/or software upgrades to all existing phones out there
Why not just roll it out in stages like any other protocol update? Build a specification that uses the EV-DO part of the network for SMS and have all new phones receive/send SMS that way by default.
The old system could be left in place indefinitely (AMPS was a dinosaur and still supported up until Feb 2008) and would receive less and less traffic as all those teenagers upgraded their phones. Hell, I doubt it would take that much time. The phone that Mom and Dad bought them three months ago is so YESTERDAY.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I don't know where you get the idea that SMS has anywhere near 0% error rate. As best as I can tell, they get sent on the lowest priority possible, are sometimes delayed for minutes or hours, and occasionally never make it at all.
I read the internet for the articles.
Email usually requires a data plan of some sort, which usually isn't free. Using ala cart SMS is usually cheaper than signing up for a data plan if you plan to send less than 25-30 messages a month. Plus SMS messages are received without user intervention or setup. Now some of us have push-email that allows us to receive email (or be notified of email) as soon as it hits our inbox, but I doubt the average joe shmoe has it. On the other hand, I'm sure he probably has an SMS equipped phone if it's been bought in the last 4-5 years.
I can't speak for the US, but here we have premium numbers for texting (usually they'll pay a little extra to get a 4 digit number). What it boils down to is that each SMS they receive (which is usually at 5-10 times the price of a normal SMS), they get approximatly 40% of the revenue and the carrier gets approximatly 60%. I say approximatly here because there are various plans, rates which are far too complex and boring to explain here.
The "Text us DURR to receive a new horoscope/ringtone/anal probe every hour" services, have the ability to send out SMS'es that cost money to the person receiving them. Once the person signed up for the service, they're free to start sending SMS'es whenever they see fit. There have been various customers who've received phonebills reaching into the 5000€ range.
The problem is that the whole thing was completely unregulated, and that there was no legal requirement for these companies to have a maximum of charges per day per customer. When that got regulated (in a very half-assed way) it wasn't the end of all the trouble they'd started. SMS Dating services suddenly got very popular, which required the client to SMS the "person" he was talking to, and which was basicly an OK for the company to start sending him a couple of SMS'es.
To cut this long story short and get to the interesting part, these kinds of companies were really goldmines when the whole SMS thing started picking up pace. The equipment is relatively cheap (you can buy a GSM modem for nickles and dimes), the programming for a system like that is DEAD easy (if you know Hayes commands and perl/python/whatever you can have a service like that up and running in a matter of hours).
The contract with the telephone company is very easy to obtain. All you need to do is provide some information about your company, and negotiate about how much traffic you'll be causing and receiving. As the amount of traffic goes up, the profits get higher and you get better rates.
These days it's much cheaper to have a large third party provide the service for you. They'll give you something like a rudimentary webservice where you can submit SMS'es to, they take a piece of the cake, the operator takes a piece of the cake, but you can still make money with the entire thing. Third parties are a lot easier to negotiate good deals with because they generate a lot of SMS traffic and get rates from the operator you'll never be able to get.
Finally, to answer your question: cell phone companies aren't sponsoring other companies to drive up usage. The whole thing was and probably still is a real goldmine. There's enormous amounts of people who will subscribe to these services, and they usually don't learn after they've received their first ridiculous phonebill.
I worked together with a company that provided such services at some point for a project that was a lot more innocent than what these guys usually did. They were raking in money back then, and since they still exist my guess is that they're still raking in money right now.
If I recall correctly there used to be a scam with premium telephone numbers on landlines waaaaaaay back when. The idea is basicly that you call a regular looking number, but in fact the number you're dialing has a special tariff. The company would then keep you on hold, occupied or stall you as long as possible from hanging up. Eventually the situation got so bad that the operators were forced to block all premium numbers which weren't explicitly marked with a special prefix, unless the customer requested access to that phone number by calling his operator and enabling that number. The unprefixed premium number business then sank into a slump and was effectively killed. This was of course borderline scamming, but the telcos didn't care because they again were making enormous amounts of money. Prefixed premium numbers are still making a small fortune these days with televised games and quizzes, call-in numbers for radio stations, etc etc. A fool and his money...
I've never met bigger sharks than telco people. From what I gather the situation has somewhat improved, but not much.
The controls are pretty redundant, and their routing is not obvious from anywhere inside the passenger module. The odds of randomly hitting anything critical with a centimeter-wide slug from a handgun before other passengers with guns would take you out is astronomical. Especially if they just had a bowl of complementary derringers at the boarding ramp.
And how is "not able to fight back" going to help us with that?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Basically, the US Constitution was supposed to say what the government was allowed to do. Specifically it is not stating what the citizens are allowed to do. It limits government, or was supposed to.
It was brilliant - form a country with a government what was basically not allowed to do anything but defend its citizens from not being free...
If it wasn't in the constitution, the federal government wasn't supposed to be doing it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.