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What Carriers Don't Want You To Know About Texting
An anonymous reader writes "Randall Stross has just published a sobering article in The New York Times about how the four major US wireless carriers don't want anyone to know the actual cost structure of text message services to avoid public outrage over the doubling of a-la-carte per-message fees over the last three years. The truth is that text messages are 'stowaways' inside the control channel — bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not — and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines. In essence it costs carriers practically nothing to transmit even trillions of text messages. When text usage goes up, the carriers don't even have to install new infrastructure as long as it is proportional to voice usage. This makes me dream of the day when there is real competition in the wireless industry, not this gang-of-four oligopoly."
you, sir, are an asshole.
1. it doesn't use the control channel: sms can be sent over GPRS which is a data channel.
2. 160 bytes isn't much data. period. even 1 second of voice require MUCH MORE routing: each packet needs to be routed individually.
3. IT DOESN'T COST MONEY TO COMPANIES! WHERE DO YOU GET THAT IDEA? Dude, seriously: it doesn't. Period. They have their own networks, data flows freely inside the network, why the hell does it cost money? Once infrastructure is paid (and with billions of text messages sent every day, it's paid for pretty quickly), it's FREE. The only cost is electricity, which is a few dollars a day for each cell out there.
4. Your argument for the banana is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Seriously dude, you need to rethink a lot of things if you think you can compare bananas in a supermarket to text messages.
Oh don't bother. If seven years of Slashdot has taught me anything, it is that Americans here on /. are so steadfast in their opinion that no amount of logic will ever make them consider anything else.
And that's not related to that god-awful Red-Blue demarcation that Americans love to spout on; push comes to shove, everyone, San Franciscans, New Yorkers, Pittsburghers, Buttesvillans are alll convinced about their moral and logical superiority, completely oblivious to the sheer reality that most of the rest of the world has far superior telecom and transport infrastructure.
Now watch as this post gets downmodded to oblivion.
More than mere navel gazing.
Texts, like emails, can be responded to at your leisure.
Then why do people feel the need to respond instantly to a text? Especially during family dinner or a face-to-face conversation? It's not as though "Pub tonight?" requires an instant reply. If it was an emergency the person on the other end would hopefully call.