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Verizon To Charge Content Providers $.03 Per SMS
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Verizon is going to start double-dipping by charging both consumers AND content providers for SMS text messages. Verizon has informed content partners that it will levy a $.03 charge for messages sent to customers, effective November 1. From RCRWireless: 'Countless companies could be affected by the new fee, from players in the booming SMS-search space (4INFO, Google Inc. and ChaCha) to media companies (CNN, ESPN and local outlets) to mobile-couponing startups (Cellfire) to banks and other institutions that use mobile as an extension of customer services.'"
Did they send an email informing everyone of this?
Most companies have email to text capability, that I use regularly (much easier than typing, even on a qwerty keypad). How would they extend fee to an incoming email-to-text message? Or will that very convenient service be dropped?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
ONLY the sender should be charged for SMS. You can't choose which ones you receive so why should you pay for them?
Gotta love the fact that even free, and things that should remain free, are now not only charged to the customers, but now to the people who rely so heavily on the power of keeping their customers informed. Only in Soviet America..
Two Verizon stories in a row, neat.
Does anything prevent content providers from using the email-to-SMS gateways to send messages for free? I know some companies who do this...
It requires the customer to tell you their carrier of course, and you need to have an up-to-date list of email-to-SMS gateway addresses for each carrier, but hey, it's free.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
but now everyone i know pretty much can email with their phones. and if not, there's an sms-email gateway, where you type their [phone number]@vzw.net or something like that. of course they have to pay for that, but if they reply, it comes in as a regular email, so you don't have to pay anything
such that i'm thinking of shunning sms use completely
sms is a wonderfully useful little signalling protocol... if it weren't being milked to death. so it will be discarded from general use, killed off by the phone company
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So, by Verizon Math, $.03 is equal to $3 dollars, right?
In the 90's there was an email circulating around claiming that the US Post Office was going to charge a fifteen cent tax on every email sent. I laughed myself silly about people that were actually stupid enough to believe it. If it ever happened, I was sure we could just encode emails so they wouldn't recognize them. Now, that I see people are actually stupid enough to *PAY* fifteen cents to send a message over the same lines on which they speak for free, it's not quite so funny anymore.
Will this apply to AIM sent text messages as well (if not, expect these people to automate it that way)? To send a text message from AIM, just open an IM to +11235551212 (+1, then the phone number without dashes). Or messages sent from Verizon's website?
It seems only fair that the senders of messages should be charged regardless of whether they are content providers or consumers. Why should a peer-to-peer twit be charged more than an ESPN score update?
The article is currently showing the tag "greed". And maybe it is greed. But what level would be a fair price? A hundred messages for 3 cents? A million messages for 3 cents?
And then there's the question of spam. I'd think that two or three cents is just about the cutoff level where spam and phishing becomes unprofitable.
Just my three cents...
I never understood the "pay to receive" idea in the first place.
Anyway, in Australia (at least with one of the companies), you have two types of message. The ones that someone sends to you, and they pay for it. Then there are "premium" services (such as weather, news, games whatever), which you pay to request.
Charging to send AND receive? Greedy bastards should be lined up against the wall and shot.
Viva le revolution!
I wank in the shower.
so now verizon is charging other people money to *call you*. aren't you alrady paying verizon to have a phone number just so people can call you and send you messages.
you would have to be a real sucker to let verizon charge your friends and associates money to communicate with you, on top of what they are already paying *their* phone company to send the message in the first place.
With email on your phone so common, why would you even want SMS and all it's limitations and cost?
$.03 or .03c :)
What is it with US telcos and SMS. SMS was an accidental hit in Europe; an engineering tool that people discovered and used free. Now the telcos over there have modest charges for sending it and rake in billions each year. But in the US first they tried to charge for sending and receiving, then massively increased the cost and now this. What is it US telcos have against SMS, I genuinely don't understand?
And this a joke on top of $0.20 each way for texts right now.
I know I need to loosen my tinfoil hat, but the article specifically mentions the Obama campaign's reliance on SMS as an organizational tool. I think it's safe to say that Verizon and its little friends are big fans of the current surveillance-friendly administration, seeing as how the W administration just gave the telcos the world's largest "Get Out Of Jail Free" card with their little "retroactive immunity" bill.
Verizon couldn't have waited until December? Or November 15? Or November 5? No, they flip the switch just in time to make it more difficult for tech-savvy candidates (largely Democratic, hmmm) to send "don't 4get 2 vote!" reminders to their followers. Obama won't have any problems -- he could likely afford the "Free-2-End-User" service -- but smaller campaigns might have to drop their SMS reminder plans completely.
Of course, I'm suspicious of the way gas prices suddenly drop in October of years divisible by 4, too. :)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
This is an outrage! If we let this continue eventually they'll charge both content providers and consumers for internet bandwidth.
If we're really lucky, this will destroy the SMS market completely and SMS will become only a quaint memory, like CB radios.
--Richard
So who's account is this going to benefit? Sounds like another "Golden Parachute" for someone.
"Well its really genius, see the Innotech software complies thousands of transactions a day that get rounded off. Well this just puts those fractions into an account and its so small no one will notice."
Everyone knows that SMS is a cash cow for the telcos.
In fact, some content providers, occasionally compared to massive primates, have a reputation for approaching telcos offering partnerships to provide data notice over SMS services through them (emai alerts, weather, stock, etc.) in exchange for a slice of the revenue pie from the receiving customer.
Furthermore, mapping a MSISDN (phone number) to carrier, and thus the internet-facing SMS Gateway, is a paid service that third paries provide -- content providers ALREADY pay to figure out which gateway to use to send an SMS to your phone. Of course this information is cached, but when a customer ports their number to a new carrior, until that cache expires, some of their notifications might get lost.
In Liberty, Rene
As a consumer, there are a number of carriers available. If you don't like Verizon's policies, just switch to one of the other US providers like AT&T/Sprint/T-Mobile. But this fee seems designed to soak service providers to Verizon's customers. They are much more likely to bend over and do some yodeling rather than forego the ability to sell things (or display ads/information) to Verizon customers.
Just another in the long series of customer unfriendly business decisions made by Verizon's management.
Cheers,
Phone companies would never rearrange pricing structures on hugely popular services just to wring more money from other companies that use them! I mean, look at SMS!
Anyway...even if they did, the "free market" would correct it...right?
I can't wait until I have "Premium" Internet with all those "High Definition" websites - it'll be sooooo much better. The phone company promised!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Sooo do they mean .03 cents or .03 dollars ?
The only reason I would agree with this model, and with the same model to be implemented into email messages, is to be able to avoid having spam as we know it. Imagine the guy that wants to use someone else's account, it would take very little time if someone charged up a whole bunch of emails even at .0001 cent it would still trigger a flag somewhere that I am being charged for emails I am not making, or that the spammers would have to make a whole lot more money then this to stay afloat.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. I dumped them as my cell phone carrier early this year because of all the little hidden charges. Each month the bill would be a little more but no change in the amount of useage( stayed well within the number of minutes on the plan) and no text messaging. I used to have Verizon for home phone and they did the same thing. Charge by the call. I dumped them for Vonage. Until the paying public gets fed up with bogus billing and charges and leaves the carrier they will continue. If enough people make a stink and go to another carrier ( I went to a pay as you go) then they might think twice. You have to hit them in the wallet or they won't care.
At last something that might reduce spim.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I have a NET10 prepaid phone, which charges $0.05 per text message. When a text message comes in, I can see who it is from, but I'm only charged if I actually read it. If I simply delete it, I'm not charged at all.
Since you asked.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
So .03 absorbs cost involved... But they charge their own customers .40 per message. .20 to send and .20 to receive.
Interesting...
~ Ron Fitzgerald
Unfortunately 'voting with your feet' doesn't work in these instances as all the major players follow suit soon after.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
T-Mobile has always double-dipped -- one SMS message is 20 cents per direction. So, if both parties text ala-carte, then it's 80 cents: 20 cents for you to send, 20 cents for your friend to receive, 20 cents for your friend to send a reply, and another 20 cents for you to receive that reply.
I bet you other companies are doing the same boofin' thing.
Is there a way to send/receive SMS over a data connection in a manner that preserves all of the customs of conventional SMS (eg, send message to phone number from ordinary phone)? I seem to remember having the choice of using GPRS as the "data bearer" for SMS on one of my old phones, though I can't seem to find it on my current phone...
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
This is horrible news for ChaCha. They currently pay their guides $0.10 for every question answered and $0.20 per question for Top Guides. I used to question their business model, wondering how much money could really be made from advertisement on their website alone. However, for the past week or so they've been running advertisements for the McDonald's Monopoly game in all the question responses instead of a link to more information about the question.
But $0.03 is a pretty big hit. I wonder if they will take the hit themselves or pass it off to the guides by cutting their payments.
Also, Verizon sucks.
Cell phone companies have forever been charging people to send AND receive phone calls, text messages, etc, as well. Isn't this just making everything else in line with that?
Twinstiq, game news
People say things like "I disagree with candidate X, but I'm voting for him anyway." Just out of curiosity, what exactly would the Republicrats have to do to actually lose your vote? Start a war? Wreck the economy? Oh wait...
I canceled my Verizon Wireless yesterday (for other reasons). If you want out of your contract with no questions asked, print out This page and take it in with you to the verizon office. Tell them this is a change to your contract and that you would like to cancel. Ask them to waive the cancel fee. Done. You even get to keep your phone (they told me to sell it on Ebay). This assumes that you were a customer back in April.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Its working so well for comcast and their customer screwing, it was just a matter of time before the practice spreads.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This does not affect mobile-to-mobile SMS, consumers will not see any charges (unless the content provider chooses to recover costs from consumers). My understanding is that this fee will be 3 cents for every premium or standard-rated SMS sent from a shortcode to a Verizon subscriber, unless the message is from a non-profit/charity or is "Free to End-User" (whatever that means, I don't know the difference between an F2EU SMS and a standard-rated SMS).
My biggest concern is that we're not going to be able to stop this, and once Verizon adopts this policy every other carrier will as well. This has the potential to seriously affect the mobile content industry.
How do you dial "+"?
... because the cost of providing SMS infrastructure is so astronomical compared to that for digitized voice services! How could they not attempt to recoup at least a small fraction of that huge expense?
This is why I love unrestrained capitalism and despise anything that hints of socialism.
(No, I'm not happy to see you, that's my facetious tongue in cheek.)
They could be charging us instead. Anyway, the only SMS I receive from those kinds of companies is spam, because the cost of sending SMSes telling them I want something from them is prohibitively high. If I had Verizon, I would be glad that those spammers were getting charged.
Dumb-asses at Verizon. Their anti-customer policies are exactly why I requested a block of all SMS and text messages on my Verizon phone, even though 300 messages are included 'free' every month with my cell phone contract. I was receiving text msgs from people I didn't know and to this day have no idea how my 12+ year old cell phone number was suddenly caught up in a spam net, especially since I never used text or SMS on that phone or with that phone number. When I politely told Verizon that I wanted my account credited for the dozens of text and SMS messages I was told it doesn't work that way. So I said ok then f--- you. Block the damned things. I knew it wouldn't be long before my allotment of 300 free messages would be used up and I'd start being charged for this spam. At first the CSR swore it was impossible to block text and SMS messages. It wasn't impossible and they did it.
Now I'm just counting down the days until my last Verizon contract obligation ends. My business uses T-Mobile and there has never been a problem once with receiving spam or unwanted text or SMS messages on any of our company's T-Mobile phones and wireless devices. As far as I know, T-Mobile doesn't plan on charging .03 cents to the sender and the receiver either. Plus the T-Mobile tech reps are totally cool and generous with their hacking and tweaking advice. "You can push it this far, but off the record, let me tell you that if you take it one step beyond, you'll turn your smart phone into a dumb brick." Their advice has always been right.
As a little followup: I use my phone exclusively in UMTS mode, so I'm never using the GSM network with it's transmission of SMS through the expensive paging channel. In UMTS, as I'm sure is the case for all of the 3G networks, SMS is just treated like any other low priority data, so the justification for charging more for transmission loses its meaning. I wonder if the telecom companies plan to keep charging so much for SMS long after the "need" to charge for it has evaporated (actually, I'm sure that they will).
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
..then don't be a partner. Send the message from outside their system.
US.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This is another chapter in the war between SMS and IM. Which will be won by the latter, I guess.
Anyway, Verizon is probably reacting to services like this which makes sending SMS from an IM client free. Install an IM client on your phone and you have free SMS.
In the long run, my guess is, we will be all using IM clients to text each other in cell phones. They will consume (a small amount of) bandwidth from our 3G data plans. They will allow us to communicate not only with other cellulars, but with computers, PDAs, and other network devices. And they allow us to text someone in the other side of the world just as easily as in the same city.
SMS may be living a brief moment of glory under the sun. Unless, of course, operators decide to charge it more competitively -- soon.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Saying Obama "voted for it" is cutting the corners... he didn't vote for that particular section of the bill*, in fact he wanted it removed.. wouldn't happen... changed, wouldn't happen much either.. but the version that was there was better than the last. You can't stay off a bill indefinitely, and when other provisions in the bill do fit your agenda (whatever that is), then you vote for it.
Hey, at least he voted - iirc (I may certainly be mistaken), McCain abstained.. 'guess that means either way he's free of any blame.
* That said... you want 'Real Change'? Have the practice of bills getting amended with unrelated items, earmarked, stapled onto, etc., ludicrous titles and filibusters stopped. Everybody knows about the type of bills... ones that aim to further curtail the movements of pedophiles or something and then slip in another bit on free-coffee-at-home for all gov't employees, then when somebody protests on the grounds (no pun intended) of the free coffee being ludicrous for tax payers to end up paying, they get pointed out instead as defending pedophiles.. yes, you and I see through that.. now check out most other people in the world (not just the U.S.). Yikes. Same thing with the names.. "Protect America Act"? Honestly? So if you vote against that, you're against Protecting America? woo, yea, that'll get a lot of nays from the no-names who are just hoping to get re-elected for the time being, I'm sure.
I should unsecure my wifi.. not like WEP is that secure anyway.
Gotta do my duty to let people send email and IM for free whenever they're within 35 feet of my house.
Text is nothing. NOTHING. To charge for it at all is ridiculous.
.03 dollars or .03 cents?
This must be to cover the settlement they plan to make for the 1200 email addresses they exposed.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
> That said... you want 'Real Change'?
Obama likes to make a big deal that John McCain voted with George Bush 95% of the time.
Presumably, that's bad .
Presumably, that's bad because Bush's approval rating is something like 29%.
Presumably, that's why Obama keeps telling us we need to vote for change.
But... Barack Obama voted with Democrats 96% of the time.
And the Democrat-controlled Congress' approval rating is something like 13%.
So... Where is the change that Obama will be bringing?
Typical of Verizon. They suck. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo glad I got away from them a couple years ago.
Re: Your cripling of SMS service providers
Message: Go fuck yourself
-nick
This is exactly how it works in Europe, and fucking good for it too. Maybe I will get less spam on my AT&T if they have to pay 3 cents to send it to me. I wish it was more than Verizon doing this..
My only problem with it would be, Twitter mobile updates may go the way of the dodo to Verizon services. And I still pay 20 cents for a text which is a fucking rip off.
I'm not surprised to hear that the most idiot friendly wireless carrier found another thing to charge you for. Let's see how many brain dead users continue to use their wonderful outdated network and locked down system for higher monthly payments!
I didn't know my Sega Master System could send text messages! I'll pay 3 cents for that! ...or is it anotehr SMS?
Lucky you guys until now, in Europe most precisely in Portugal Mobile companies charge 0.05â ($0.068) for each MT (Mobile terminated) message.
Verizon phones are the less capable of all providers, the only reasons I have them as my carrier are:
- Everyone I know has Verizon, so talk time is included in the price
- Alltel is the only other carrier that works in the area
- The bill comes out to $50 a month.
I'd love to switch when my contract was up, as long as there was a good alternative, so far there doesn't seem to be. iPhones do not get any reception.
If everyone just refused to send txt messages to Verizon users it wouldn't be long before angry subscribers got this idiotic charge dropped or they moved on to another service. I for one would be moving now and not waiting. But then - I have already moved.
20 cents, not 15
Seems like Twitter would really get hammered by this. If they have to pay 3 cents per SMS, they are going to lose even more money. They had to stop offering UK service because of SMS charges. Since they have no business model or revenue, this could be serious.
Unfortunately 'voting with your feet' doesn't work in these instances as all the major players follow suit soon after.
<cynic>I think Ritz_Just_Ritz might have meant leave the country, as the wireless plans in Japan, Korea, and several European countries appear to gouge less.</cynic>
I don't get charged for incoming calls. Neither should you.
While there are other things I don't like about them (Such as how difficult it is to sign up for unlimited data - the reps can't seem to grasp that I just want a data pipe to my phone!?), in this regard they've been pretty good. Still waiting for a GSM network, though I don't think that's going to happen any time soon...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I've often wondered how many SMS messages equal one second of a typical phone conversation? .. So lets figure it out:
IIRC EVRC used about 6-8k. The alternate clear voice codec has a data rate of 13k.
Divide by 8 to turn kbits into kbytes
750-1000 bytes (EVRC) or 1625 bytes (clear voice) respectivly depending on the codec enabled in your phone.
Lets assume the typical SMS message goes something like this:
"Hey chica, How R U doin? For a good time meet me at that one place"
Which I think is fair, I'm guessing more messages are on average shorter than than this. This message is 67 bytes.
So we convert our byte counts above to number of SMS messages:
11 - 15 SMS messages per second for EVRC or 24 SMS per second for the clear voice codec.
This is a Naive estimate in that I have no clue about the difference in framing overhead between SMS packets and voice packet streams. For latency concerns I would assume packet demarcs are somewhere on the order of 10-30ms for voice conversations.
Regardless I think this demonstrates how absurd and out of touch SMS pricing is in relation to the actual burdon placed on the network to provide these services.
In other countries in Asia SMS is essentially free. These schemes only push people to use Email or instant messenger bypassing SMS alltogether.
Companies are obviously doing this because they feel they can get away with it. With number portibility laws in the US and plan lockin/early termination fees on increasingly shaky legal grounds it may prove to be bad business for Verizon et al to continue to cling to such nonsense.
fucking absurd, this is the two-tier network, this forces small ingenuous services out and only google chacha etc are then able to participate, huting the telecoms with decreased usage, seriously the sms messages cost them nothing, they use basically zilch bankwidth, by cutting off the network interconnects they hurt themselves and their customers.