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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?
ONLY the sender should be charged for SMS. You can't choose which ones you receive so why should you pay for them?
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
You pay a service contract fee for a data line.
You pay an extra fee for using that data line to send SMS messages
You pay and extra fee to use that data line to send http, pop, smtp, https traffic
You pay an extra fee on top of that if you want to use that data line to connect a computer
All at fees that are going up exponentially while cost per bit goes down for the company, I would love to see those margins. This is what is going to happen to your internet service soon people.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Most of the rest of the world doesn't charge to receive SMS, only to send it. The receiver's network charges the sender's network a small amount for each one (although the big networks don't pay anything). The only email to SMS gateways either charge money or are run by the networks themselves. A few tried to be bidirectional - receive SMS messages (and charge the sending network) and then forward them to email, but I don't know of any of these that still survive since people only used them one way.
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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,
Blackberry on T-Mobile, $55/mo for basic voice and unlimited data, no contract. No SMS either, but that's where the unlimited data comes in.
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.
I'm on a Net-10 "pay as you go" minute phone. It doesn't charge me unless I actually read the message; there is a "meter" on the phone's face that tells you how much airtime you have left.
Free Martian Whores!
He's not talking about emailing from your phone. He's talking about sending an email to your phone that gets delivered as a text message. Big difference. There's no data plan involved.
Verizon will send a text message to my phone if someone sends an email to <my number>@vtext.com and happily charge me for it, even if it's spam. There's no way for them to charge the sender.
End of line..
A fair price would be the same as all other data transfers. It's all bits anyway. You should pay the same price for a given number of bits, no matter what protocol you're using.
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Unfortunately 'voting with your feet' doesn't work in these instances as all the major players follow suit soon after.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
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.
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.
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.
Seconded. And there's no surcharge for using the GPS capabilities of your device, or for tethering it to your computer as a modem. Verizon nickel and dimes you with all of their "additional" services. The only thing they have as a benefit is better coverage, and that's rapidly waning. I'll deal with not having coverage as far into the mountains as Verizon does if it means I save $50/mo on the same services.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
T-Mobile lets you change yourNumber@t-mobile.com to nickname@t-mobile. It stopped spam instantly when I did this because I only gave my nick to a few people. Very nice feature. Other providers may do this as well.
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.
By far the thing that bothers me most about text messages is paying for the privilege of receiving SPAM. If they pick a price point that puts an end to SPAM then this is a great step. But, I don't suppose that could happen. Given the money they make from the receivers, they'll make an exception for the spammers so they don't cut out that revenue.