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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.'"
This message just cost me $427 to text.
The only rising cost in text messages is the time (and money) out of the end-user's pocket, to have to read and delete spam messages sent to their mobile phones.
What rising cost? Text messages cost about as much as extra minutes (give or take, depending on the carrier), and yet they take much less bandwidth than voice calls. Much, much, much less bandwidth.
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.
Well, it could be that the competition was driving prices down to a lower level and then after the two consolidated, this (money losing) price reduction natural re-adjusted back up.
Another reason could just be that it's just as easy to sell plans at 10 cents a txt as it is to sell them at 5 cents a txt. We simply don't realize the cost adds up as consumers.
It could also be that people use text messages about twice as much now as they did in 2005 and the hardware just can't take it, so they adjust the price to reduce usage.
I think we've discussed this absurd price before. I am quite naive about the whole electrical engineering side to this but well versed in the software of it. If it costs nearly nothing for me to talk for a minute, why couldn't they wrap the txt into a digital signal identical to what our vocal signal is wrapped up in and just let the receiving unit decode it as a special text message across the same audio range (like the old phone modems)?
My work here is dung.
Sounds like the Cellular industry hasn't been contributing enough to a certain Senator's campaign.
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(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Another interesting question: my phone service (through Verizon) has free after-hours calling, but I pay the same rate for text messages and other data services regardless of time of day. Surely if the data from my phone call is cheaper to transmit at 10pm, then the data from my SMS message is too?
Herb, we told you the check was in the mail, why can't you be more patient? I have to warn you if you continue on this track future checks may be even slower to arrive. I'm sure you'll start to see things our way very soon.
Sincerely,
AT&T
I guess our senators have nothing more important to discuss.
Kohl said he is particularly concerned that all four of the companies appear to have adopted identical price increases at nearly the same time. "This conduct is hardly consistent with the vigorous price competition we hope to see in a competitive marketplace," he wrote.
I wonder if things will get as far as a price-fixing investigations?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Yeah, that sucks. Text messaging should be dirt cheap. Yeah, they're making an enormous profit off it.
But text messaging is voluntary. You can stop any time you want. They're clearly charging what the market will bear.
Sure, it makes them look like scum when they're getting paid huge amounts for not doing very much... but c'mon, Senator Kohl, that's the American Dream! If y'all don't like it, get rid of your cellphones and use email.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Issues that matter to people will always get raised during election time. The price of gas will drop dramatically pretty soon just before the election and there will not be any connection to world events. It happened times before and will happen again. Everyone knows Oil Industry == Republicans and the easiest way for them to gain favor is to relieve people with lower gasoline prices for a short while.
But these tactics aren't limited to the price of gasoline... we will see more issues like the price of texting or all sorts of other nonsense that people can rally behind. It is unfortunately a part of the game and typically, even though people get excited about the apparent intention to reign in some justice and sanity, almost nothing ever really happens... except, perhaps, additional contributions from the accused industry.
The amount of data in a txt, maybe a kb or so with overhead, should be virtually free to transmit compared to voice traffic. This is especially true since the voices are digitized and handled as data.
In other words, they've been a price gouge from the start, and we're surprised when the companies try to push the envelope to get as much out of the gouge as people will put up with?
I've got a bridge to sell you...
I'm pretty much the least informed mobile phone user on the planet. (I bought some Nokia phone with a bundled prepaid card, because my wife made me, and barely use it. I wrote the number on the back of the phone because otherwise I'd have no idea what it is.) And I'm only paying 10c to send texts and 5c to receive! And that's current, because I just looked it up, after looking at the phone to remember what company I'm with. Who is paying 20c?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Actually, they're not charging what the market will bear. They're banking on the idea that the 13-year-old who texts his/her friends 100+ times a day and who's on their parents calling plan will have parents too milquetoast to cut off their text service.
SMS prices are not based on what they cost to deliver they're based on what the market will bear. Downloading an mp3 over SMS would cost over 5 grand.
I'm not sure there's so much collusion as a majority of people willing to pay insane prices for texting, and cell phones in general. I recently found a cell phone bill from about 10 years ago - it was $9.99 per line (times 2) plus tax (I got a local big-employer discount, the regular rate was $14.99 per line). It came with, I think 120 minutes, which is all I ever use anyway. My current Verizon bill is now easily $85/mo for two lines with a basic text package. Sure, there's been inflation, but there's also less competition.
I understand that in countries where the service providers are separated from the equipment providers the competition is fierce. I'm not sure but I'd guess that it's because people can jump from provider to provider on their non-crippled phones.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"Because we can."
My employer pays huge text messaging bills, mostly because they view the 10 cents a text message costs to be a non-starter. Even with the average user sending 100-200 messages, that only tacks on $20 to the average cell phone bill.
And believe me, at my company, each phone is easily a $150/month bill.
When you're billing out engineers at $200/hour, another $20 on the monthly bill is nothing. I'd guess that the average high-volume cell user is typically not watching the nickels and dimes on the statement.
Although that's one of the most overused tags on Slashdot, and it's rarely applicable, this is definitely a case where it should be tagged as that. I don't think I can since I'm not a subscriber, though.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
A: Choose one or more:
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Who cares. So the costs went from a dime to two dimes. Maybe it is even a blantant example of monopolistic behavior at work.
But honestly, we have much bigger problems to worry about. Bringing this price back down to a dime will not stop the erosion of the American dollar, will not create jobs or raise wages for starving American workers, will not halt the monopolistic practices that continue to destroy the American economy, will not get the real estate market back on track, will not bring our troops home, will not prevent the total collapse of our health care industry, will not do a thing to address the growing identity theft crime wave, and so on.
Once again our representatives quibble over secondary (but showy) BS while the serious issues go ignored.
Text messages should be free. The bandwidth required to send a text message should be ridiculously low. I can understand the desire to recoup development costs of the service, but I think this is the cell phone carriers way of tapping in to the elusive younger crowd's wallets to spread their income across a larger spread of services.
Cell phone carriers should provide this as a free service to entice subscribers to switch to them. I predict this will go the way of the ATM fees once one major service provider starts promoting it. I can see the campaign now, likening it to freedom. "Those other evil companies want to suppress your freedom of text! Not at X carrier, let freedom ring!"
If someone calls you, you pay. If someone texts you, you pay. If no one does anything and you don't have a rollover plan, you lose your minutes and, ergo, you pay. We are far removed from land line days where only the initiator of the action paid for the action and if you didn't make LD calls and you had unlimited local calling, your bill was about the same each month.
Why have prices increased so much in the past few years?
Simple... because people will pay that much.
Which is exactly the reason it will continue going up.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
Excellent! I'm happy to see a senator doing something for the people. Unfortunately, I am not one of his constituents. I'll bet he has kids or grandkids that do lots of SMS messaging, and has noticed the increase in the bills. I wonder when a senator is going to get pissed off at Comcast.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
At least make incoming SMS free. I get so many requests for money transfer SMSes from Nigeria and Togo.
I spent over $50 in text overages last January, so I got the $30 unlimited Family Messaging plan from AT&T. That worked.
In Asia, they have incoming SMS free, why not do it in other areas as well?
slashdot rocks
I for one welcome our Questioning Senator Overlords!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Which way did they go? They're still around and have only increased.
We respectfully take your concerns into consideration, and present you with this money basket. We hope that this free donation to your re-election campaign, brand new BMW, and lakehouse are enjoyed thoroughly by you! Thank you for ceasing your inquiry - err, we mean, thank you for invariably enjoying our gifts!
Love,
The Telcos
In coming needs to be free as well having 1-800 text numbers that are 100% free and the 1-900 based ones should just have there fees not fees + the standard rate.
dude texting is FREE. ... 80 years ago? /.
after a decade of rip-off, sending
a bunch of ascii chars is free.
the mobile phone was invented
gawd i can post free on
I have been paying way too much for way too long. I use like 5 minutes a month and pay about $30/mo. I have been wanting to go to one of those pre-paid phones and get my monthly payment way down. Unfortunately all the pre-paid plans minutes expire way too fast and such so you end up not really saving that much. I believe T-Mobile has a $10 90-day thing though so I have been thinking about that. Any good?
T-Mobile is also one of the very few providers I have found that have a pre-paid Nokia phone. I have tried about every phone out there and it seems only Nokia has the stuff I want:
I have never seen any phone other than Nokia that even has one of those features.
Nonsense. We need to slap a "vice tax" on text messages, like we do on cigarettes and alcohol, to discourage their use. At $20 a text, perhaps the world will finally be free of this insidious evil.
Mod me down to -1, Troll, please.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
0.10 dollars or cents?
any look at this.
http://www.chopstork.com/blog/2008/07/01/verizon-math-infects-att/
The actual cost of text messages to carriers is a joke but they charge us like there's some super hard technological feat. Consider: 160 byte maximum, and assume you can send them for a low low price of 5 cents a message. 1,024,000 / 160 = 6400. 6400 * .05 = $320 a megabyte.
What a ripoff. I'm all for paying for services, but the carriers are clearly sticking it to us. I can send a picture message for a quarter (5 times the cost of a text message), and I can guarantee that every image I send is more than 160 * 5 or 800 bytes, and it goes across the same network.
It makes me grumpy.
Government do something to encourage free-market competition among the carriers in order to bring prices down.
Having government artificially limit how much profit texting can generate for the carriers will not do anything to help improve service.
Texting is not a basic human right.
the increase does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages
No shit sherlock.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
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.
Hey this is fun...I can speculate on a lot of possibilities too *cough* collusion *cough*!
But aside from randomly guesses, there is one thing I know for sure: in a competitive market, costs to the consumer are driven to down to the cost of production. We all know reading slashdot the cost to make a text message is approximately nothing. Ergo, something is seriously wrong with the market here.
Are we suspecting, these guys have formed a trust to keep the prices same and/or rising? No... With 4 players, any one of them can hardly be called a monopoly either.
Then leave them alone and don't engage in price-control, Senator. Better yet, build your own wireless company — if you charge less for the same services without sacrificing other aspects, people will flock to you in droves...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Companies only believe in the free market when it suits them, so they don't deserve it. The only way to keep prices low is to intelligently regulate and keep the corporations small and relatively powerless so they don't have the resources to buy their way into the government's good graces.
Without stiff and proper rules keeping corporate interests separate from government interests, you always end up with corrupted governments relaxing regulations and robbing public resources for private profit, or as they like to call it, privatizing. Notice under the Bush administration that all of the deregulation and plundering of public property has resulted in a highly unstable economy. When you eliminate so many rules that the only thing stopping the resulting mega corporation from ripping people off are the inherent ethics guiding a company, you'll quickly be reminded that the only moral standard they answer to is the bottom line.
Who wish I could disable text messages on my phone. I wish I could activate a feature so when someone sends me a text message I don't see it and they get a response telling them to just call me.
ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH
But the price they charge customers will depend on what customers are prepared to pay. Network operators charge more, per amount of data moved, for text than they do for voice (a single SMS uses less bandwidth than a second of voice, yet costs about 20x voice on most plans). Since it is waste, they can afford to discount heavily to bulk buyers (who don't mind their SPAM taking a bit longer to get there).
Thus, network operators love text: it converts their waste into something more valuable than their main product. How cool is that!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I mean, shouldn't we be looking at the ridiculous airtime charges? Roaming fees? Unreasonable cellphone plans? Compared to all that, texting just seems minor.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I'd like you to justify the sharply rising costs of the Federal government.
I'm concerned that rising debt, deficit, and the size of government programs reflects decreasing adherence to the laws that grant power from the people to said government. I'm concerned that citizens are paying more than 3.2 trillion Dollars to fund the government this year, up from 1.8 trillion Dollars in 2000.
This increase does not appear to be justified by rising costs of administering a constitutionally authorized government. I am particularly concerned that both of the major political parties appear to have adopted identical spending attitudes at nearly the same time.
This conduct is hardly consistent with the vigorous competition of ideas we hope to see in the 'Laboratory of Democracy'."
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As things like Android phones emerge, I wonder if there will be ways to hack around stuff like absurd SMS costs? Like:
The idea of getting IP-over-voice despite the carriers' rules strikes me as hilarious, even though it would be obscenely slow for anything bigger than text messages.
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.
How to make money in capitalism while your market is cornered by a monopoly of sorts:
1) Create startup $1-a-month text-message hosting/delivery company
2) Barely break even for the first month, but generate huge userbase
3) ????
4) Profit!
(???? = Get bought out by telecom, so they can keep their monopoly and continue gouging)
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Actually, he's got all the money he needs. If Herb Kohl wants "a brand new BMW" he can buy one with the weekly interest from his bank account. And that is why he's willing to stand up to them. Now if we could only get him clued enough to not do chowderheaded things like voting for FISA.
Which, let me note, is exactly the kind of thing that we geeks need to pay attention to. Legislators like Kohl who *do* frequently do the right thing should be so overloaded with capable, free advice on technical issues that those advisors could create their own baseball league. Me? I've gone over tech issues with our new mayor, some members of the city council, and several dozen other legislators over the years. Try it, folks. You might be surprised how many will listen if you're calm, specific, informed, explain why they should care, and don't ramble.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Another reason could just be that it's just as easy to sell plans at 10 cents a txt as it is to sell them at 5 cents a txt. We simply don't realize the cost adds up as consumers
I think it's more a case of s/notice/care/ for most cases...
The fact that it hasn't implies that the cellular market is not free.
Says who? There are four providers of text messages, and several other means of communicating data. Would you believe that for many people, the VERY SAME DEVICE that sends text messages for $0.10 can be used to send a one-minute voice communication for ZERO INCREMENTAL COST to the customer, but the customer chooses to pay the $0.10 anyway?
Not to mention the myriad of other ways people have to share information OTHER than text messages.
The high prices of text messages indicate that there's no competition in that market.
Except that YOU don't get to decide whether the price is high or not. The market does. And the *MARKET* has decided that the price of text messages is reasonable. People are willing to pay $0.10 to send a text message. What it COSTS to provide the message is irrelevant.
Did you know that people sell oil and gold for more than the cost to mine it? Did you know that that soft drink you pay $3.50 for at the movie theater costs the movie theater pennies worth of syrup and cold water?
Did you know that you can get a cell phone plan that lets you talk on your phone from nearly anywhere in the country and to anywhere in the country for *LESS* than it used to cost for a landline and long distance?
Did you know that many drugs sold for $10 or more a pill cost mere pennies to manufacture? All you have to do is invest a few billion in finding one that works.
And while the incremental cost of sending a text message may be $0, all you have to do to send them is invest a few hundred billion in a cell phone network....
At the end of the day, if people are willing to pay $0.10 a minute and $0.10 a message, then that's what people are willing to pay. Which one provides the better margins to the cellular company is irrelevant, as long as people are willing to pay the price charged and the company has enough revenue to stay in business.
paintball
One of the posts above explained how SMS works by sending it over one of the frequencies reserved for the tower talking to the phone. I'm rather curious.. how will SMS work when LTE or WiMax (4G) comes out? It'll end up being data, more than likely, which would give up the carriers' reasoning, wouldn't it?
I'd rather see government do something to encourage free-market competition among the carriers...
So, what would you suggest? We've already *had* three full rounds of anti-monopoly/trust legislation and each time it gets subverted. What do you suggest that:
A.) can get passed (by both houses) (and not get vetoed)
B.) is comprehensible to the average voter
C.) can be defended against the inevitable several hundred million dollar disinformation campaign that the affected corporations will wage against it
D.) provides a clear path of responsibility for an agency that is tasked to enforce it in a transparent and persistent way.
E.) has a clear and consistent metric for penalties and/or requirements for disbandment that are proportional to the problem and enforceable and give judges and/or regulators some degree of leeway for special cases
F.) Won't then be utterly subverted in a decade or so?
Make no mistake. I would love to see something like that. But it's a just a wee bit more complicated than "somebody should, ya know, do something."
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Yes but the substantive content and intrinsic profundity of the messages has increased over the years. Further costs are incurred as a result of the sheer philosophical depth of these messages.
What does intelligence have to do with it. The texters are kids. They have no sense of value. They'll pay anything, and Verizon, et al. know it.
The true meaning of free in free market is that once the corporations get large enough in size, they are free to do whatever the hell they want.
Every successful economy has a well regulated system with many free market elements, but never a truly free market. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to provide a counter example.
It's called, charge as much as you can without pushing away your customer base. One carrier raises prices a little, then others follow suit, because they can. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. As text messaging demand is increasing, rates keep climbing, even though supply is limitless. It's a total win situation for the telcos. Once upon a time, when incoming text messages were free, and outgoing cost $.10, I didn't mind having the service, and actually kind of liked getting the free alerts that were available. Then SMS spam showed up, and my carrier started charging me $.10 for incoming / $.25 for outgoing. Then $.25 for incoming/outgoing. So, I vetoed with my pocket book and blocked SMS completely. That is, until just about everyone complained they couldn't SMS me, and wondered why I wouldn't reply. So, I finally started paying for a subscription plan, but I feel like a total sucker. As long as it's a service that people depend on, they can charge whatever they want for it and get away with it. The only thing you can do about it is block the service and ignore it's existence, and just try to get people to email you.
If I jack the price of a gallon of water, people will use less water. At a point, farmers will use less water; but up to that point, they will happily use 8 gallons per square foot per day. When I get so far, they'll use 7 gallons, and it'll start bringing me in less net profit beyond there. Jack the price up to that point, duh. Same with text messages.
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With texting continually on the rise, is it possible that less airtime minutes are being used? To keep steady (or steadily rising) profit margins, is it possible they're raising prices to balance things out?
What is really amazing is that people seem to come out in droves to defend the carriers. I wrote an article on the ridiculously high cost of text messages some time ago (which was also featured here on /. as well as several major media outlets - yes, I'm tooting my own horn) and couldn't count the people who came out and said "DUH! They're charging what they are because people are willing to pay it!"
These are the kind of assholes who troll around the web looking for any discussion in which to insert their derogatory "I'm smarter than you - it's so obvious!" attitude while ignoring the issue at hand. No, prices are not justified by the markets willingness to pay them. Do you think it is justified that a friend of mine had to go $400,000 in debt because he got brain cancer while he didn't have insurance? His family was willing to pay it, so it must be a great deal, right? Do you think that higher and higher gas prices are justified even while the price of oil drops and oil companies post record profits quarter after quarter?
No, of course those things aren't justified. Just like it wouldn't be justified if all the food manufacturers suddenly decided to charge 10x more for food. It's anti competitive and it's illegal for a very good reason. Price fixing ruins the free market and ensures that consumers get the crappiest possible product for the greatest price. It ruins innovation and takes a huge dump on everyone in the market. Several historical examples show this, but I won't get into that here. Two seconds of critical thinking will get you to the same conclusion.
Text messaging is a 100 billion dollar industry in the U.S. That's bigger than all the movies, all the music, and all the video games in the entire world put together. The current cost of a single 140 byte text message is 40 cents (which is obfuscated by the fact that the sender AND the receiver are both paying 20 cents each). I can get a letter hand delivered to any doorstep in the U.S. for about the same price. The cost of a text message to the carrier is virtually ZERO. Yet somehow, they are saying that 40 cents is a fair price. I want to know why, and I'm glad someone in congress is doing something about it.
My article on the subject is here, btw, for anyone interested or who hasn't already seen it: http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages
or else!
I should have made clear, contingent on no one exercising monopoly pricing power. But that's a lot different than just 'the prices went up'. Consolidation often results when there are too many companies in a business and the prices are too low for the businesses to sustain themselves.
paintball
Well, perhaps Senator Kohl doesn't understand that newly evolving technology and expanding markets (and yes, wireless communication still (barely) falls in this category, imo) often produce highly unstable prices for goods and services. Unless he can find a smoking gun indicating collusion from his "inquiry" (a proposition that nearly demands a goodluckwiththat tag), the providers can respond that market forces are at work (i.e. rising demand, which has little to do with the supplier's costs). Over here in Germany, the average customer happily bends over and pays 9-19 cents per text, and I'm guessing the German big-dog T-Mobile wouldn't mind introducing its business model to the American consumer base. The Senator should find more productive things to do than rattle sabres to grab headlines... after all, only presidential candidate senators are allowed to do that full time instead of work.
Herb Kohl keeps getting reelected. He is (or at least appears to be -- which is a lot more important) for the little guy.
Seventeen bytes is REALLY A TAX ON OUR INFRASTRUCTURE, DON't YOU UNDERSTAND!?
Screw this, I'll use the internet thankyouverymuch.
the services work over _public_ airwaves (don't get me started on the fallacy of airwave "sales/auctions"), which are naturally constrained. This is one industry which is under-regulated.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
While the big boys are charging $100 or more for their unlimited calling plans, there are a couple smaller providers that offer unlimited calling and texting and everything else for less than $50 (even down to $30 if you just want unlimited talk). And more importantly, there are no contracts involved. Hell, here (in Vegas) they're even offering the first month or two free (depending on which provider).
It took a while, but the general populace is finally getting fed up with the nickel-and-diming that the big wireless companies are so fond of, and the small providers out there selling unlimited services at a reasonable price are growing by leaps and bounds because of it.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
What I don't fscking like is that they don't charge for SENDING text messages, they charge for RECEIVING them. If you don't want to pay for individual text messages received, you have to pay $5 each month for unlimited texts. So you either pay them 50 or 60 cents a month for some spam texts that you never wanted, or you pay them $5. It's theft. Imagine if the postal service charged you to receive mail. Think of all the junk mail out there that people would send you for free. Fsck that. They should charge for sending texts. Receiving should be free.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
It's not a free market because I can't purchase AT&Ts text messages if I'm a TMobile customer and vice versa. If your car could only buy gas from one company then you would see extravagantly priced gasoline.
Yes, clearly. That's why I said "vain hopes".
My surprise was that all of slashdot (including many intelligent posters) is invariably shocked, shocked! to hear once again that there is no competition in the sms market. Or, even more strangely, they make logical arguments assuming that prices are competitive.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I don't want to be able to receive text messages, but this is not an option. Ergo, I get to pay USD$0.20 per *unwanted* text message.
In other words, I lose even though I don't want to play.
The 4 carriers will bundle up some private campaign contributions from their employees for the good Senator, just like Big Oil did for Obama so that he could somewhat plausibly deny taking campaign contributions directly from Big Oil, and that is the last we'll ever hear of this matter.
Did you know that that soft drink you pay $3.50 for at the movie theater costs the movie theater pennies worth of syrup and cold water?
What I find more outrageous is the drink smuggling industry -- it's costing the Movie industry an estimated $12.5 Million a year! It's obvious that they have to charge more to make up for these substantial losses.
A neutral communications medium is essential. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true.
Obviously you're missing a few economics classes. The perfect competition isn't about the price people is willing to pay, that's a monopoly or in this case, an oligarchy. Perfect competition should theoretically reduce the cost of the service to the cost of providing the service.
This is really just a case of economics in the context of our country's flavor of laissez faire capitalism...
The cell phone service provider market exists in what's called an oligopoly right now, i.e. a handful of large providers dominate the field. This is further complicated by users entering into (typically) two year contracts which freeze their monthly prices and the providers segmenting their users by charging more for what they perceive for "business use" (e.g. unlimited data on a typical consumer phone through verizon is15/month (vcast), with blackberry it is 30/month, with a blackberry using enterprise server (i.e. the only way to file mail into folders, calendar sync wirelessly, etc.), it's 45/month).
Given the market structure (oligopoly), prices don't have to tend toward the price of a service. The providers have gradually increased their prices in order to maximize their income. They realize that people are willing to pay more for text messaging and are charging for it. Further, each time they raise rates, they give users an exemption from their early termination fee though most people don't switch between providers much since most people typically can't choose between more than 2 in a given market and still receive good service.
Ultimately, over time mobile email will overtake SMS but that's just my prediction.
...American Idol. Yes, it may seem like a rather simplistic answer to the bullshit pricing schemas, but sometimes the truth IS that simple.
If you ACTUALLY think that American Idol still exists after this many seasons because the music industry is dying for talent vs. the $15 - $20 million in revenue generated week after week with bullshit text voting, you're sadly mistaken.
Shit, every other consumer text plan looks like a bargain compared to that crap.
The price of text messages is unreasonable. Proof can be found in the fact that during a disaster such as a hurricane the mobile companies urge people to use text messaging instead of voice communications. Either mobile companies are scalping people by suggesting the more expensive text messaging during times of emergency, or it is less expensive to maintain the text messaging network.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Although I'm inclined to agree with the other posters who say it's greed, I don't think that's the reason (at least not all of the reason).
The companies are optimizing for profit in a given regulatory setup. If you want to change the behavior you have to change the regulations.
Until that happens (anyone want to bet on when it will?) the telcos will keep sucking.
My UID is prime. Hah!
if there are 4 providers and all 4 change there price from 10 cents to 20 at about the same time (in the US) it is collusion and is illegal. Ask the Pacific air cargo companies.
Please re-evaluate your use of the word "trolling" in the post above.
Honestly expressing an opinion which is unpopular or which is contrary to your opinion is not trolling.
Honestly expressing an opinion or fact which is objectively wrong is not trolling.
Trolling has been defined as "To deliberately post false or controversial messages to gain attention for the sake of gaining attention."
Posting a message on Slashdot that says that the next Apple will run Windows is trolling. Posting a message that McCain is gay on a right-wing discussion board is trolling. Posting a message that Honda hasn't made a good car in decades on a Honda discussion board is trolling.
Referring to taxes on cigarettes and alcohol as "vice taxes," on the other hand, is common usage. GP was clearly not trolling, no matter what his opinions and/or your opinions on the subject of taxing cigarettes and alcohol may be. It's not about correctness or popularity, but rather about intent. Let's keep the word "troll" a clear, distinct, and useful concept instead of bending it into "someone who disagrees with me about something."
My truck is like a series of tubes.
It's a fucking email, it should be delivered for free within the cost of regular service.
Mobile phones can send text messages now? Cool.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
We set up a family plan with Verizon a month ago. An additional $5 US charge on the plan got us unlimited incoming and 250 outgoing (shared) messaged. That seemed reasonable.
Then, we got our first bill. Nearly $200 in txt messaging charges, at a rate of about $1 per message. Apparently, although we made double sure, the rep who set up our plan over the phone didn't include txt messaging.
I'm thinking class action, I know I'm not the only one whose getting nailed like this. $5 vs $200, it's criminal.
I'll likely be able to talk them out of the charge, but that's beside the point.
It seems silly to nickel and dime-ing us for texting (actually that'd be quarter-ing, but that brings up excessive imagery...). I pay for a plan that gives me minutes for calls. Why not just deduct a minute for each text? Any text is clearly only going to take you the equivalent of less than a minute of a normal phone call to say. Why not just charge that way? Adding on .25 each time I text seems retarded when I have 300 unused minutes each month (I'm on the lowest minute plan too). Thankfully I at least get free incoming calls, texts, and photos. The lowest texting plan is still actually below the amount I pay for texting now. So it's still more cost effective for me to pay per text than to sign up for a texting plan. This is only because I don't respond to texts unless it is important. If they would charge differently I'd probably use it more often. It just bugs the shit out of me looking at my bill when I get charged extra for texts while I never come close to exhausting 3/4 of my minutes...
"People are willing to pay $0.10 to send a text message. What it COSTS to provide the message is irrelevant."
The cost is not irrelevant. If consumers are willing to buy for $.1 and the providers are willing to sell for $.01, economics says the price should be between $.01 and $.1. But why should it be $.1 and not $.01? Why is it clamped at what the consumers are willing to pay and not what the providers are willing to sell for?
It is because the providers set the stage. They have control of the market. They operate together, not necessarily directly through collusion, but possibly indirectly through using the same marketing research companies, industry organizations, et cetera.
In a healthy market, the price floats somewhere between the minimum price the providers are willing to sell for and the maximum price the sellers are willing to buy for. There is a give-and-take. Prices may hit one end of the clamp or another from time to time due to natural fluctuations, but when it is grossly disproportionate to actual costs, then there is something wrong. The market is unhealthy and is being unfairly manipulated.
That is why cost is relevant.
One word:
Collusion.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Did you know that people sell oil and gold for more than the cost to mine it?
Did you now the Oil companies are watched like hawks for trust violations? and that a large part of oil prices are set by the largest cartel in the world? Hardly a free market.
Did you know that that soft drink you pay $3.50 for at the movie theater costs the movie theater pennies worth of syrup and cold water?
Sounds like vendor lock in, which last time I checked was considered a coercion of the free market.
Did you know that many drugs sold for $10 or more a pill cost mere pennies to manufacture? All you have to do is invest a few billion in finding one that works
NO, bad idiot, read some facts. drug companies spend more on ads then R&D, it's just they get the govt. to strong arm everyone through intellectual property laws to pay more, Complete failure of the free market.
In the competitive free-market advocated by Milton Friedman, not The oligopolistic-market advocated by the modern republicans, the consumer demand and the cost of supply set prices, not the whims of some giant company that has strong armed govt. support and stifled competition.
It's basic morals, universalize the maxim: if every company did the same you'd only have on company left after a while, it would be the one who controlled the food and you'd have to sell your life away for just enough food to survive. It happened in the past, it was called feudalism, and is basically what your view of business advocates at it's extreme.
I can definitely say that the price of text messaging is set to maximize profits only.
They understand that kids will be kids and won't listen to their parents and text 10 to 1000 times more than they are supposed to.
That being said, text messaging is to Cellular companies what last barrel pricing is to the big oil companies.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Kohl for President!
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
And while the incremental cost of sending a text message may be $0, all you have to do to send them is invest a few hundred billion in a cell phone network....
...and get the public air wave spectrum from the public or get popped by the FCC. Not a free market because I can't set up my own cell phone company right now. Deregulation means deregulating the air waves which means anyone could jam Rush with impunity, and you wouldn't like that, would you? Now, go back to your pretendsville and keep thinking we could have a *real* free market out there.
Just callin' it like I see it.
The fact that it hasn't implies that the cellular market is not free.
Says who? There are four providers of text messages, and several other means of communicating data. Would you believe that for many people, the VERY SAME DEVICE that sends text messages for $0.10 can be used to send a one-minute voice communication for ZERO INCREMENTAL COST to the customer, but the customer chooses to pay the $0.10 anyway?
Not to mention the myriad of other ways people have to share information OTHER than text messages.
The high prices of text messages indicate that there's no competition in that market.
Except that YOU don't get to decide whether the price is high or not. The market does. And the *MARKET* has decided that the price of text messages is reasonable. People are willing to pay $0.10 to send a text message. What it COSTS to provide the message is irrelevant.
Did you know that people sell oil and gold for more than the cost to mine it? Did you know that that soft drink you pay $3.50 for at the movie theater costs the movie theater pennies worth of syrup and cold water?
Did you know that you can get a cell phone plan that lets you talk on your phone from nearly anywhere in the country and to anywhere in the country for *LESS* than it used to cost for a landline and long distance?
Did you know that many drugs sold for $10 or more a pill cost mere pennies to manufacture? All you have to do is invest a few billion in finding one that works.
And while the incremental cost of sending a text message may be $0, all you have to do to send them is invest a few hundred billion in a cell phone network....
At the end of the day, if people are willing to pay $0.10 a minute and $0.10 a message, then that's what people are willing to pay. Which one provides the better margins to the cellular company is irrelevant, as long as people are willing to pay the price charged and the company has enough revenue to stay in business.
What are you dense?
Cell prices, internet, phone service, cable tv, software, music, videos, oil/gas. The list goes on.
None of these things have anything to do with your warm fuzzy ideal of a free market, there is no deciding by the customers. Market forces mean little to a cartel, even less to one thats lucky enough to control something people can't do without.
"what the market will bear" its the biggest load of shit I've heard since "piracy is killing the music industry"
You think 5 dollar a gallon gas is what the market could bear?
Wake up and smell reality, the American dollar crashed, It's lost nearly half its value, imports died, markets that relied on exporting to the states have died. The Canadian manufacturing market is crashing hard because the US cant afford the price of gas to ship it down to the states, and the weaker dollar means they can't afford to buy as much either. Car companies are posting billion dollar losses, and don't expect to see a proift for years to come. Who wants to buy a car when a gas for a month costs more than your lease payments?
The price of food is skyrocketing up. It costs more to ship food from the farm to the store (and usually a processing plant in between), even people who have no cars are being driven under by the high price of gas.
And for all that, for destabilizing the market on an entire continent, when the price of oil starts coming back down what does OPEC do? They start talking about cutting back production to keep the price where it is.
This has nothing to do with what the market can bear, the market is dieing under the price of oil. but since OPEC is a consortium they don't worry about market forces, there are no competitors for them, no body will spring up start selling gas and half the rate its currently at (that was the price about 8 years ago).
Why does this work anyway? because we NEED oil, our whole way of life is based on it, even the military is chained to an oil dependency. We pay what ever t
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.
Very good, senator. You have discovered that price is NOT based on cost plus markup. Price is determined by supply and demand, and texts will be priced the highest that the market will bear.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
It's a joke, guys. He's commenting on how Republicans always paint Democrats as elitists, no matter how much their policies benefit the little guy. Republicans will destroy us economically and send us to be maimed or killed in a war, but you're an "elitist" if you suggest that we deserve a living wage and affordable health care.
Fuck off.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The price per a la carte SMS has gone up, however there are plenty of cheap plans replacing them.
So, you've got people shifting to the plans, typically your high-quantity users. The customers remaining are unwilling to pay US$10/mo for an SMS plan. These people will be the ones who don't send many per month.
Since the cost to bill an SMS is fixed (the network has been purchased, but not paid for), and as the number of a la carte SMS that the network delivers drops, that component of the per-SMS price goes up. That will result in upwards price pressure.
Even better, SMS bundles are cheaper to administer and bill than a la carte. That provides the carrier with an additional incentive to convince people to shift to a plan.
BTW, customers like the certainty that comes with a fixed-price unlimited bundle.
Also, I've seen figures saying that about 2/3..3/4 of a carrier's operating costs revolve around billing.
I find it kind of odd that Kohl didn't include US Cellular as a recipient of his letter. As one of the big regional telecom players in Wisconsin, you'd think they'd be on his radar, particularly considering that their a la carte SMS rates have nearly doubled (from 15 cents to 25 cents per msg) in the last 2 years.
Oh well, I guess I'd expect Herb Kohl to forget to include them on the letter... he's been becoming quite senile over the last few years. Luckily for the Badger State, we've got the notoriously feisty Russ Feingold as our other Senator, and he's been busy with more important telecoms issues... like trying to stop Ma Bell's metamorphosis into Big Brother.
herb, $5mil deposited in reelect account. pls confirm and good luck. this txt msg free for u as gift.
I want to chime in with maxume (above).
In college, I had a friend that worked at Home Depot while majoring in Economics.
He always laughed about all the customers that would complain to him about the high prices and then continue to buy stuff from Home Depot. The obvious thought being, "if it's too expensive then don't buy it here". But the same customers kept coming back. Proving that the prices were NOT too expensive for them (not enough to make those customers seek other sellers or alternative options).
IMO, money speaks louder than words.
If people pay this much for text messages then text messages must be worth that price to them.
The proof being, people keep paying for them!
-J_Tom_Moon_79
I use Cricket and pay only $45 a month for unlimited text, calls, and data so I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
This is not a market failure, but rather a government failure. It's the government that's decided that we aren't mature enough to send and receive whatever broadcasts we want over whatever spectrum we want. The spectrum is, in theory, infinitely divisible, and essentially limitless. But of course we can't find the most effective way to limit interference and broadcast over anarchic airwaves unless we're forced to compete - unless it's either find a way to broadcast, or don't. Until the FCC stops regulating the air, you'll never see a true free market in cellular data (and voice, whatever). Rationalitate
I know this is a site for developers but not economists but as a developer who has some econ background it pains me to read the horribly misplaced beliefs about the behavior of firms in the teleco industry.
First of all this is not a monopoly, it is truly closer to an Oligopoly where there is still some competition in the market. Furthermore you don't even have to be an economist to understand a rise in costs you just need some common sense. As time has passed people have demanded more text messages, their demand has increased. Due to this the consumer is willing to pay more for text messages at a given price. Telecos' costs have probably not risen dramatically, however, because demand has risen they have become willing to supply more text messages at a higher price. This higher price is a refleciton of both competition and increased demand. Determing which is more at charge is a much more complicated issue but the idea of blaming this on monopolistic behavior, greed, or a lack of care on the side of the consumer is just ignorant.
Is this really the type of thing that our elected officials should be worrying about? Seriously folks...
There is a very basic concept in economics, also sometimes referred to as supply and demand, that states (in simple terms) that "things cost what people are willing to pay". This is why you'll pay $4.50 for a tub of popcorn at the movie theaters where you might not be willing to do so anywhere else.
Simply put, text messages prices are based on what people have been willing to pay up until now.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
I wish the Senator meant to raise the questions he raised...but reading between the lines, he's saying: "Why didn't you give me a piece of the action"
But we don't know that they're willing to sell for $0.01. All we know is that none of the participants think that lowering the price will get them more revenue. That's the price the market will bear.
It's hard to argue that some sort of oligarchy is pushing the price up when looking at something like text messages, for which there are several alternatives - it's not like anyone is ever faced with 'send a text message or die'. Or even suffer significant cost. Anyone who doesn't want to pay the costs for text messaging can simply USE THE SAME THING THEY ARE HOLDING to MAKE A PHONE CALL.
Did you know that the post office charges $0.42 per text message, and it takes days to get there?
paintball
... the post office is charging $0.42 per text message, and it takes days to get there!
paintball
Senator overheard yelling at teen daughter.
You can't carry around a water fountain.
The pricing of text messaging from cellphones has always been disproportionate and egregious, right from the beginning. It got that way and stayed that way because too many ignorant and/or impatient consumers were foolish enough to conclude it was a fair price. It was never a fair price. The bandwidth consumed by even a full A2 page of text pales in comparison to that consumed by even just one minute of voice data stream. SOME PEOPLE have always known this, and/or been bothered enough enough by the greed of it to say no, but those people are apparently an extremely small minority.
Text messaging is to cellular providers what fries-and-a-coke are to fast food joints: pure profit. You can't change it or people's perception of that now, any more than you can educate people to conscientiously say no to those fries and coke. The concentrators of wealth won this battle "fair and square".
If people complain about the $0.10 charge, why not get an unlimited or high-volume plan?
I have unlimited SMS, MMS, and internet data from AT&T for $60/mo, and I can tether it to my laptop too.
Without the internet, their high-volume (3000, I think) plan is $20/mo. That's less than a penny per message, unless you exceed 100 per day.
They also have some $5/mo plan which gives you 100 per month or something.
I don't think these prices are unfair at all.
-David
The idealistic model is of course, just that: free citizens participating in consensual economic transactions, with prices set based on the supply/demand curve, supply adjusting to demand and demand changing due to price, etc.
But that all assumes functioning markets, usually idealized as perfectly competitive, with perfect information, instantly propagating price signals, etc. Some deviation from that is always true, but it really starts making the whole setup hard to maintain---and the pro-free-market philosophy hard to state with a straight face---if it deviates grossly from the ideal.
That's why we have laws to try to keep markets functioning properly. For example, to try to keep the "perfectly competitive" assumption from going too far off the deep end, we have laws against using monopoly positions in one market in a way that would manipulate another market, and laws against small numbers of companies with very large combined market share in some market colluding to set prices, reduce competition, etc. To keep the "perfect information" assumption vaguely valid, we have laws against fraud, false advertising, etc.
These are actually all good for capitalism, in the sense of a sustainable system with functioning markets that efficiently allocate resources.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This isn't anything new for the telephone companies. After they were partially deregulated, they starting gouging their wireline customers with insane markups on optional features like caller-ID, call waiting, etc. To add insult to injury, they refuse to spend any of their huge profits on doing the database lookups that would greatly improve the quality of caller-id data.
http://calleridunavailable.blogspot.com/2006/09/what-your-phone-company-doesnt-want-you.html
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Lying Verizon commercials showing a couple buying a house that is in a known "dead zone" but "the network" says its OK, because they're "with them".
When we bought our house in May, the dead zone was/is a dead zone and Verizon's CEO's secretary told me to find another carrier - the schmuck that he is. Maybe its time to investigate why companies LIE so much.
That is the crux of the matter. While they are not happy with current cell phone rates they still pay them. Even when there are viable alternatives I have seen people go with specific carriers because of the phones offered or the "deal" offered when joining.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
... the post office is charging $0.42 per text message, and it takes days to get there!
Yes, but a post office text message can contain about 840 Verizon text messages and a memory card with 16 GB of data. Trying to send that over a cell phone would take half a week of data transfer and cost you three arms and a leg!
WERE kids.nowadays we have the 21/22 year olds who grew up with cell phones that text messaged between networks since they were in high school/middle school, who are now entering the workplace ($$$) and now paying for this on their own. The 25 and up crowd only saw txt messaging work across all networks "flawlessly" toward the end of high school/college and have had to pay for/meter their own usage for a lot longer.
I suspect in reality its half greed, half desire to push users onto a fixed txt msging plan ($4.99/ month for 400 msgs, $9.99/ month for unlimited, or whatever). Whever makes the argument that the cost of the service is what's driving the cost up is an idiot. The first thing budget carriers offer is free unlimited txt msging, and most times they're much cheaper than "nationwide carriers".
moox. for a new generation.
The price of something on the street should have nothing to do with how much it costs. The only thing that is important is what the buyer is willing to pay for it.
We do certainly have the power to fix this. You port your number to the carrier with the cheapest text messaging plan, and you tell you old carrier why you made the move. Everyone has had a chance to do this at least once since 2005 (assuming you hit with a 2 year contract) many of us have had three chances.
With my myFaves plan at T-Mobile, with 300 minutes a month for non-faves people, I can add on unlimited domestic messages for $15 a month. I hate to sound like Richie Rich, but I spent that on dinner for two at KFC, before I bought the drinks.
1. Someone post all telecom execs cell numbers.
2. Everyone SMS these execs to tell them the rates suck.
They are letting the real problems slide in order to get re-elected more easily.
This sentiment is one of the few things that Ron Paul and Al Gore agree on in their recent mass-market books. Congress (and the federal government as a whole) have always been imperfect, but now they're even more useless than they've been for many decades. It's high time to start going to state legislatures to press for an amendment to the U.S. constitution on Congressional term limits. (Good luck getting an amendment started in the usual way by 2/3 majorities of the House and Senate).
The House is especially an issue, considering that they now can spend the majority their term preparing for re-election if their state's primary is in the early part of the year. However, the Senate has plenty of dinosaurs too. While I don't wish any ill will regarding his health on my state's senior senator, the fact that Ted Kennedy has been in office longer than the majority of his constituents have been alive (median age in Mass. is 37) is a farce. Strom Thurmond took office when racial segregation was a mainstream mindset in much of the country (late 1940's) and served until close to the end of the 20th century. Do you think someone who's in office for 30 or 40 years is going to continue to remain in touch with how the majority of his constiutents feel on fundamental issues, especially the younger ones? Changes in racial attitudes, for instance, were revolutionary during Thurmond's term.
After FDR, we decided that two terms for a president was enough. One nice corallary to that amendment is that a president only needs to worry about one election while in office; and since he's typically (though not always) unopposed by his party for the second term, he needs to do full-scale campaigning for only a few months of his presidency. Federal judges' life terms allow them focus on their cases rather than keeping themselves on the bench at the ballot box. I think it's time Congress needs to have the "I need to keep myself in office" mindset reduced significantly. Make the House of Representatives have four year terms, limit of two; the Senate should be limited to two six-year terms.
Maybe once we get some new blood circulating through Capitol Hill we'll see some production out of Congress. It's up to the states to make that happen. Maybe California can start things off with one of their ballot initiatives calling for a constituional convention on term limits?
In about a month I'll be jumping off the parent units' family plan and promptly forming a new family plan with the girlfriend. (jesus said it was okay)
When this happens, I'm going to trade up for a fancy iphone or blackberry curve or some such. At that point, all the people I care to type to on my phone will have a dataplan and I can just email them.
In an ideal world I could just be happy with that and make sure I never send a text message, but I don't want to get charged 20 cents every time one of my douchebag friends sends "omg did u see the bears game last night?" to everybody on their goddam contacts list.
What are the odds that a telco, specifically AT&T, will sell me a phone with SMS disabled so I never have to worry about being charged for this crap?
Three arms and a leg? Try an order of magnitude higher... according to this, it would cost about $24.5M to send just the 16GB of data via text messaging.
Sanity is like a condom: rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
They can because of current technical limitations. And I don't feel bad about it.
The problem is only voice packages get compared. Texts are in the periphery.
To fix this, I propose the following solution: we treat phones as a-la-carte services. That means your voice provider can be ATT, your data provider can be Verizon and your text provider T-Mobile.
This strategy would then provide the required market forces for bringing texting costs under control - namely competition.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
just use file compression before you send it, that will likely halve the amount of data and therefore cost.
Next!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
..when a network provider is also a higher-level-services provider.
If Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. just sold us bandwidth, and we had to get higher-level services from someone else, we would be better off. SMS would go away and we would switch to jabber. You get billed for a hundred bytes of I-don't-care-how-much-latency and that would be that.
It's the same situation as the cable ISPs. Using your IP service for VoIP or downloading video: they hate you. Using your IP service for web browsing and paying them extra for their VoIP and video: they love you. But in the second case, you're not really getting anything more (but you're sure paying more).
Likewise, the mobile carriers are delighted that we stupidly use SMS, instead of our own protocols running on top of IP.
FWIW, I think anyone should be free to sell us dumb things like SMS as expensively as we're willing to pay. BUT (and this is a big "but" because it nearly nullifies my previous sentence) any time we negotiate with them for a special favor that they want from us (such as an exclusive license to use a radio frequency band, or easements to run their cables over other people's property), then we should negotiate much, much harder. Don't just as for dollars. Demand that they be a neutral ISP without the inevitable conflict of interest that arises from selling other services that ride on top of that bandwidth.
That would solve this nonsense instantly.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The cost of acquiring that extra arm goes up non-linearly, too.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
Don't have to use your imagination on this one, it really happened: ...several Middle Eastern Looking Men rise from their seats and head for the front of the plane.
On the way, they kill a flight attendant that was standing in their way.
The unarmed passengers are unable to stop them.
The MELM eventually take over the plane and crash it into a large building.
Thousands die.
Thousands of children cry.
Feel Safer?
Just because you don't trust yourself with a gun does not mean that I, my brother, wife, father, son, daughter, ... cannot be trusted with ours.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Interesting. I didn't know that. It's sad that sexuality, which I assume is what you're implying, should be such a factor but you're probably right. I'll look into that.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
I couldn't agree with you more. I would like to think that out here in Oregon we send some pretty good folks to D.C. but Wisconsin has definitely got a pair of winners.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The cost is not irrelevant. If consumers are willing to buy for $.1 and the providers are willing to sell for $.01, economics says the price should be between $.01 and $.1. But why should it be $.1 and not $.01? Why is it clamped at what the consumers are willing to pay and not what the providers are willing to sell for?
Actually, I thought it was because people won't switch their plan or carrier over the difference between 1c and 5c and 10c texting. If there was a free market for texting -- you could have one carrier for voice and another for texting -- I'd think prices would change very quickly.
Imagine if your phone company charged you to receive a call on your cell phone!
Wait... in the US, they do. How quaint (from the viewpoint of most Europeans).
They should charge for calling a cell phone; receiving a call on one should be free.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
Title says it all, really....
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Touche... of course.