Why Text Messages Are Limited To 160 Characters

The LA Times has a story about Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the communications researchers behind efforts to standardize various cell phone technologies. In particular, he worked out the 160 character limit for text messages. "Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand's magic number ... Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks. This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. ... Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Comments

I'll Be Damned

[eldavojohn]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, it was the largest number that Hillebrand could count to in his mind before losing track.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[zappepcs]

Are you kidding? They lose interest based on who it's from long before any reading of text messages is required.... except for mobile twitterers. Nobody can explain that.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[JeffSpudrinski]

The few times I've tried messaging from my cell phone, my thumbs cramp after about 50 characters, so the "limitation" never affects me.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Red Flayer]

tl;dr

Re:I'll Be Damned

[bunratty]

I guess you had something interesting to say on that second line, but I lost interest at the end of the first.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to make two posts next time. Character count with space = 208.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone us...

I totally lost interest past that.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Midnight Thunder]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

I don't get your point. All I read was: "And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone u".

Re:I'll Be Damned

[NeoSkandranon]

fb

Re:I'll Be Damned

[maxume]

What?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

... or before they rear-ended the car in front of them.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Locke2005]

Gee... I thought it was because the collision rate for morons reading text messages while driving went way up for messages longer than 160 characters!

Re:I'll Be Damned

[BrokenHalo]

You might want to make two posts next time. Character count with space = 208.

Don't start me. I know any number of supposedly intelligent people who are apparently incapable of reading a simple email containing a series of questions or points.

They will respond to the first question, but anything after that is consigned to /dev/null. I occasionally get cranky about it and send off a series of single-sentence emails, with the query in the sentence line.

I don't know whether it's my circle of acquaintances, but the worst offenders seem to be MBAs. (Maybe it really does mean Master of Bugger-All). Or maybe it's just the Simpsonisation of society that gives it the attention span of a flea.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[omnichad]

I don't get your point. All I read was "I don't get your point. All I read was: "And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was t"

Re:I'll Be Damned

[ivucica]

<joke type="bad">Noob</joke>

I actually IMed two times for half an hour. Messages flied non stop. Why? Waiting for night public transportation for cca 45min can be sortof ... boring. I was desperate, even at expense of my fingers.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[nlawalker]

This may be my number one pet peeve when it comes to professional communication. I have tried a number of ways of getting multiple questions to register, but nothing seems to be perfectly effective. The best tactic I've managed to come up with is including only the following in the body of an email:

1. A preamble, no longer than two sentences, that says something along the lines of "[Person's name here], I need your response to the following questions by [date]:". Using their name is key, even if no one else is on the To: or CC: line.
2. A *numbered* list of questions (not bulleted), each ending in a question mark.

The other thing I've started doing is keeping a running list called "waiting on" that serves the sole purpose of listing the responses and tasks I'm waiting on from other people, no matter how small. As a consultant, I've found that "due diligence" means "one reminder email at least every other work day" when it comes to getting questions answered. Otherwise, getting chewed out for not adequately following up is a very real possibility. I've been asked for a paper trail before, and I always get a laugh of approval when I spool out the reams of email I've sent trying to get the simplest questions answered.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Hognoxious]

Even if you separate them into paragraphs, they assume there's an implied "or" between them. I find numbering the separate points helps. Sometimes.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[jcr]

the worst offenders seem to be MBAs

MBAs from what schools?

I've found a tremendous range in quality among MBAs, with Harvard MBAs being just about useless, and Stanford MBAs generally being people I'd trust to run a business.

-jcr

Re:I'll Be Damned

[hosecoat]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

you mean type

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Bemopolis]

Our last President had an MBA from Harvard. Just what are you trying to say?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[khellendros1984]

Frobozz?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

"The LA Times has a story about Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the communications researchers behind efforts to standardize various cell phone technologies. In par"
Story about SMS: 160c FAIL. How about (92c):
"LATimes:Hillebrand'\''s msgs oft 160"
-os

Re:I'll Be Damned

[TarrVetus]

Our last President had an MBA from Harvard. Just what are you trying to say?

Gasp! Obama, Kennedy, Thoreau, Emerson, Yo Yo Ma, W. E. B. Du Bois, and a and a plethora of others also got degrees from Harvard! That must mean he thinks they are fools, too!

Burn him! Burn him at the Stake of Generalization! The Internet must know no peace!

Re:I'll Be Damned

[BrokenHalo]

MBAs from what schools?

Not that it's particularly relevant, but a range of Australian universities mostly. Incidentally, Harvard MBA degrees are usually not recognised here as having a value >= toilet tissue.

What I was addressing is the kind of mindset that MBA courses foster, and I can't say I have any answers as to what to do about it.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[bennomatic]

You're totally right.

• people respond somewhat well to bullet lists
• people respond somewhat well to numbered lists
• give people a paragraph or two and they will either ignore it, or worse, call you.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[bennomatic]

Oh yeah, and lots of whites space gets better responses; if you don't separate your bullets, it starts to look like a paragraph.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Aphoxema]

There needs to be a 'SMS mode' for Slashdot where you can set replies to your comment to be a maximum of 160 characters.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[BrokenHalo]

Harvard has a bad rep for its MBA degrees. That doesn't AFAIK apply to its "real" degrees.

(I'll probably attract flames for that quoted word, so let's just say that's my prejudice and leave it at that.)

Re:I'll Be Damned

[ChrisMaple]

Thoreau and Emerson are not modern; Harvard has changed for the worse. Yo Yo Ma is a musician, irrelevant to the current context. Which Kennedy? Obama and W.E.B. DuBois are leftists bent on the destruction of the U.S.. None of this is relevant to MBAs from Harvard.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[MrMarket]

Have you tried picking up the phone. You can always send your e-mail (but with the answers) as a paper trail of your conversation.

It provides two benefits:

1) Developing relationships. It's amazing how far a few seconds of idle chat can go to put a human side to your interactions with the people you need things from. This is really important with gatekeepers.

2) Forces you to be concise: If you have 30 seconds to ask for something - you'll be forced to get to the point more quickly.

If you don't get them, don't leave a vm. Just send your e-mail and call them later.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[BrokenHalo]

There needs to be a 'SMS mode' for Slashdot where you can set replies to your comment to be a maximum of 160 characters.

I think there already is. It's called Twitter - where (L)users can drop 140 characters of excreta at a time into an uncaring void...

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Stanford MBAs generally being people I'd trust to run a business.

Standford MBAs from what year?

I've found a tremendous range in quality among Standford MBAs, with 1969's being just about useless, and 1968's generally being people I'd trust to run a business.

-AC

Re:I'll Be Damned

[laskeyel]

I totally thought that it was for some scientific reason too. I feel like with the advent of querty keyboard phones and the remarkable adaptation generation Y has made regarding the texting world, that they should increase this amount. Imagine - if people could put together long messages the need for Internet on phones could be reduced (texting replacing email). What a terrific way to save some money!

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, 160 is the number of bytes in a single GSM packet.
Which is usually used to transmit 20ms of audio. Or a single text message. If we assume your cell call costs 1 ct per minute, a single SMS should cost 0.000333ct.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[FatdogHaiku]

If you make it into a MySpace style survey (mix in questions about favorite color and second letter of last name, etc.), not only will they answer you, they will forward it to everyone they know... and most of those people will also reply.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Aphoxema]

I think there already is. It's called Twitter - where (L)users can drop 140 characters of excreta at a time into an uncaring void...

No no, I mean something even less useful than that.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[nlawalker]

Absolutely, but it's all part of the balancing act.

A phone call is one of the very best things to do if the person you are communicating with is someone you almost never see, such as a resource from a partner company. In this case, I will typically call instead of sending the first reminder email that I would normally send. Some people are great about responding promptly to the initial email and I find that emailing with those people is often as friendly and effective as phone calls. You also have to watch out for people who are of the opinion that "if it's not on paper/in an email, it doesn't exist." Your boss may be one, and the person who is supposed to be answering the questions may be another. I've actually had people disavow answers they've given me over the phone.

Things are much more complicated if the person you are asking questions of is in the office with you. When communication breaks down to the point that you are sending reminder emails, I consider it to be purely for "paper trail" at that point. After sending a first reminder, I will almost never phone them about it or approach them in person, unless it's at a meeting directly related to the pending responses. Most of the time, they know that you are doing your due diligence and generating a paper trail, and they don't mind, but they really are just too busy to get back to you at the moment. Approaching them in person comes off as "hey, I'm important enough to demand your time, so why the hell don't you come clean on those answers I've been bugging you about?"

Like many things, every situation requires a personal touch. Business = people.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[centuren]

It can be a real time waster, also. I'd rather stay in my work flow while someone figures out whether or not s/he has the answers to my questions, versus waiting on the line as that person thinks out loud.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[nomorecwrd]

Actually, SMS is like a "stowaway" of a signal your cell must receive from time to time.
So the "real" cost of a SMS is 0.000000.

This is a broadly known fact.

Years ago, here in Chile anyway, SMS where free of charge.
Now is pure profit. (about 8ct/SMS at current exchange)

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mister Whirly]

Our last President had an MBA from Harvard. Just what are you trying to say?

His dad pulled some serious strings?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Just Some Guy]

They sure do.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

congrats on the fail there

Re:I'll Be Damned

[jcr]

Our last President had an MBA from Harvard.

He didn't have a great record as a businessman, did he?

-jcr

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

You lost. Get over it.

And not my a small amount either. The word is landslide.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

>>If you don't get them, don't leave a vm. Just send your e-mail and call them later.

You must have done MBA in communications. What next? Let's see - Call them, do NOT leave vm, call them later, do NOT leave vm. If it does not work, email them, WITHOUT body? As a last ditch effort, I guess you would suggest to SMS them, but do not include a message? FFS.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[DrLang21]

I think it's fair to assume that "if it's not on paper/in an email, it doesn't exist". If you call me for something or hit me up at the end of a meeting for something, and I can't give you answers immediately, chances are that I will have completely forgotten about it by the time I can get to it. Granted, this should never be used as an excuse to purposely ignore something. It's really all about what you are looking for. If you need something fast, face time is the best way to get it. But if you can't get what you're looking for out of a 1 on 1 conversation, you always should follow up with an e-mail.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[ZygnuX]

Nice to see a fellow from Chile.
Buena loc@ :D
In Argentina it was the same, they were free of charge, and then they changed it.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

160 characters ought to be enough.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[an unsound mind]

Okay, "Obama is bent on the destruction of the US"... after he's done nothing much, after eight years of Bush?

Wait, what?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[SpaceLifeForm]

The cost is zero to the telcos, but the profit is gravy.

It is a complete rip-off scam to the consumer.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[elrous0]

I always thought it was the highest number of characters a teenage girl could read or type without becoming distracted.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[operagost]

2 trillion dollars of "nothing much".

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Kaitnieks]

Don't you dare calling me and disturbing my trail of thoughts with simple, non-urgent questions! I hate when people do that. Makes it impossible to work. Calling should be the last resort.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[afabbro]

You lost. Get over it.

And not my a small amount either. The word is landslide.

I wasn't aware that 52.9% constituted a landslide.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was to limit the amount of characters I can type before glancing for baby carriages at crosswalks or other cars. Trying to write longer messages is dangerous.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Hatta]

1) Developing relationships. It's amazing how far a few seconds of idle chat can go to put a human side to your interactions with the people you need things from.

It's also amazing how annoying your idle chatter can be to a busy person who is trying to do things for you. Email is asynchronous, so the busy person can attend to it when they have time. A phone call is always an interruption.

2) Forces you to be concise: If you have 30 seconds to ask for something - you'll be forced to get to the point more quickly.

In my experience, those most likely to use the phone are also the most likely to prattle on and on about completely irrelevant topics.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[MrMarket]

I don't know about you, but I find vm ridiculously inefficient when compared to e-mail. Leaving mumbled phone number at the end of a 2 minute vm will guarantee that you get dropped from my to do list.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried picking up the phone.

Yes I have. It's attached to my head for 10 hours non-stop, and when I'm emailing a co-worker I'm probably already talking to a customer. My "productivity" is measured by how many customer calls I take so quite frankly I don't have the time to waste on the phone with workers in other states who are simply slacking off.

Note also that the people who are the worst about reading and/or responding to emails are also the ones with a perpetually full voice mail, and never actually pick up the phone when it rings.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Thinboy00]

I guess you had something interesting to say after that comma,

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Hognoxious]

Have you tried picking up the phone. You can always send your e-mail (but with the answers) as a paper trail of your conversation.

I have. It doesn't work.

They just claim they were too busy to read it, or they didn't understand it, or simply lie about what was said[1]. Ultimately, sending out an email along the lines of "Re: phone conversation yada yada ... in response to my question XXX ... you answered YYYY ..." still comes down to your word against theirs.

[1] This has happened to me even before the phone conference finished - they were (to my mind intentionally) misinterpreting what I'd said earlier. And my manager was there. For all the good it did, the spineless twat.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Lord Ender]

Out of hundreds of schools, how is it at all useful to single out two?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Hognoxious]

Which Kennedy?

I'm not fucking telepathic, but we were talking about presidents [of the USA one assumes], how many with that name has there been?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Hognoxious]

Not that bad.

Or perhaps you're factoring out the effect of who his dad was. So what are you, some kind of communist?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Hognoxious]

I've found a tremendous range in quality among Standford MBAs, with 1969's being just about useless, and 1968's generally being people I'd trust to run a business.

Is that 1968s from North facing rooms or South? I tend to find the latter are a little less full bodied, though the former sometimes have a slihtly musty nose to them, almost as if they're corked.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[jabithew]

Welcome to first past the post. We've been using it longer than you, and it still sucks.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[labnet]

Almost every time I sen an email off to anyone in the USA, I'm lucky to get my first question answered correctly, even if I use the bullet pointing technique (although I admit I don't number them).
I don't seem to have that problem in Australia.
Can anyone suggest why this is so?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Urkki]

Actually, SMS is like a "stowaway" of a signal your cell must receive from time to time.
So the "real" cost of a SMS is 0.000000.

This is a broadly known fact.

Just like the "real" cost of a phone call is also practically zero for the operator, as the extra electricity used for one call is basically nothing. So every call charged by minute is pure profit for the operator.

Which is (partly) why there are packages with a lot of free minutes and messages. At least in Finland, for around 50 eur / month you can even have unlimited audio and video calls, unlimited SMS and MMS messages and unlimited 3G data.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[swv3752]

The Cost is zero if you consider an SMSC to be free. Besides that sunk cost and nominal cost to keep an SMSC up and running, there is no real cost for in network messages. The cost to your carrier to run an SMSC is probably about the same as the cost to your ISP for its email servers. There is a significant cost to out of network messages, as high as pennies per message to go across one of various internetwork carriers. So $5 for 200 text messages if all were to go out of network would involve a very slight profit for the carrier, if not be break even. The overages thing is just gravy for them though.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[kramulous]

I hate getting a phone call, especially when I hit my programming 'zen'. Friday afternoons seem to be fine though.

However, the masters of the universe in the basement that are the gatekeepers to physical machine access seem not to mind so much. Years ago when I'd ring up for a request, it was always 'is there a ticket?' in our ticketing system. Which is a pain in an emergency - a ticket can get 'lost' or buried under other tickets.

However, years later, having talked to the guy after a best friend of his died, his long time dog died, I don't get asked for a ticket. When something needs to be done urgently, it gets done immediately. I won't abuse the access. I still use the ticketing system. I'm just saying that the personal touch really does work wonders.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[theaveng]

>>>The cost is zero to the telcos, but the profit is gravy. It is a complete rip-off scam to the consumer.

I disagree. The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith, and is not necessarily tied to the actual cost of the good. You might call it a "ripoff" but it's a ripoff that customers *voluntarily* enter into. They could just as easily decide not to do texting (as I do).

The flip-side of this is that money collected from all these texters helps subsidize my (and your) voice calls. I pay just 18 cents a minute, which is a real bargain considering wired phone calls in 1990 used to be 25 cents a minute. Simple inflation says the price should have increased to 45 cents, but instead prices have dropped and with the added benefit of being wireless. Without texting the voice calls would have to be significantly higher in order to cover the maintenance/electricity costs.

Anyway it could be worse.
The cellphone company could be run by Congress (like Amtrak).
In which case you wouldn't have a choice;
instead they'd suck the money from your paycheck.

With today's private companies I can choose to buy or not buy, text or not text, make calls or not make calls. I control my own destiny and how much I want to spend (or not spend).

Re:I'll Be Damned

[theaveng]

>Look

It is pitch black. You are likely to be
eaten by a grue.

> what is a grue?

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence
in the dark places of the earth. Its
favorite diet is adventurers, but its
insatiable appetite is tempered by its
fear of light. No grue has ever been
seen by the light of day, and few have
survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

(This brings back good memories of staring at my tiny 15" television while the blue-on-blue text scrolled across my little 1 megahertz Commodore computer. Ahhh to be a teenager again; no worries except remembering what time Buck Rogers comes on.)

Re:I'll Be Damned

[hurfy]

Perhaps the
comment form
from the
Idle section
would be more
your style...

Re:I'll Be Damned

[theaveng]

P.S. In case you're wondering why the paragraphs are so short, it's because the C=64 screen was only 40 characters wide due to its limited 320x240 resolution, which was imposed by the channel 3 RF cable connection (analog blur). Higher resolutions would have been unreadable.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[kramulous]

Not sure about dropping from the to do list, but I cannot stand a vm. People talk too quickly, you *never* get the phone number and have to listen to the message a billion times to get each digit, and in my old phone's case, I cannot make a phone call until I listen to all the vms.

If you miss me, hang up the phone and send an email.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Gaian-Orlanthii]

You'd be amazed how many people in my social circle think that SMS Telcom-related communication costs are 'reasonable' and 'within technology expectations'.
Actually... you probably wouldn't be amazed.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[KDR_11k]

Tech support?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Toonol]

Ok, added you to my friends list. It's depressingly rare that I see a Slashdotter that understands even the most basic concepts of capitalism.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[daBass]

That used to be the case when SMS first became available, already paid for in the basic equipment and hardly anyone used it. But with the volume it is being used in now, there most definitely is a cost that is involved in upgrading systems to deal with it.

Remember how at midnight, new year's eve your SMSs didn't used to arrive a few years ago and now they do? Why do you think that is? Exactly: investment in increased capacity.

The price they charge is too high for sure and it is a cash cow, but to say the cost is 0 is just dead wrong.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Toonol]

Landslide? Look up the figures.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[pablodiazgutierrez]

I know at least one well reputed professor who behaves just like that at his best. Most often you don't even hear the echo. I think this is just a severe case of tenuritis, though, so it might not be related...

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

If this were a regular democracy, that would be a valid figure. Instead, he won ~68% of the electoral college, which is what matters.

By the way, Eisenhower's landslide victory in 1952 was with 55% of the popular vote. But, he got 83% of the electoral college.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Gaian-Orlanthii]

You're an idiot.
Sorry if that sounds like a personal attack but perhaps I'm just wrong about you. Perhaps you have actual consumer choice and the democratic power to change those consumer options. Perhaps you like being a slave dork. Perhaps you're not just a shill for some telcom.
Like MOST PEOPLE I live in a country that's whored itself off to some greedy international name-brand run by a bunch of secretive shareholders, someplace.
You want to see how 'the market' is magic? Try http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/29/0044216&art_pos=1The Greenlight example.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[hcgpragt]

Or they get too much email already and need you to communicate more efficiently. It might be a hint? In communications always ask yourself this question. 160.|

Re:I'll Be Damned

[demonbug]

I'm sorry, your query has exceeded the 140 character limit of our help system. Please reformat, retype, rethink, and resubmit your query.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Rob the Bold]

Interesting of all the notable Harvard grads that you would pick those two as "bent on the destruction of the U.S." As opposed to Ted Kaczynski, or maybe Theodore Hall? I mean, DuBois hasn't even been all that active for the last, oh I dunno, 45 years or so . . .

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

I was scrolling down this page, and I must say this was the first thing I actually read after the article and the first couple comments.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mr2001]

I disagree. The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith, and is not necessarily tied to the actual cost of the good.

I think you mean Adam Smith, and I think you're misreading the GP. Cost != price. The retail price is whatever the market will bear, but the cost of providing SMS service is virtually zero.

You might call it a "ripoff" but it's a ripoff that customers *voluntarily* enter into. They could just as easily decide not to do texting (as I do).

It's awfully glib to say we shouldn't be upset about being ripped off just because we have a choice. In a free market, with healthy competition, the price of goods and services should fall to just above their actual cost. That obviously isn't happening with SMS: customers would like to pay less, but no one is offering SMS for less, even though it costs almost nothing to provide. Doesn't that suggest a market failure?

Anyway it could be worse.
The cellphone company could be run by Congress (like Amtrak).
In which case you wouldn't have a choice;
instead they'd suck the money from your paycheck.

Or perhaps it could be run like the US Postal Service, in which case it would provide world-class service at a far lower price than any of its competitors. The USPS will carry a physical envelope from my doorstep to someone else's doorstep, thousands of miles away, for less than the price of 3 text messages.

(I'm not saying we should nationalize cellular companies - just pointing out that services set up by the government aren't inherently inefficient as you seem to be implying.)

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Rob the Bold]

The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith

Adam Smith?

Without texting the voice calls would have to be significantly higher in order to cover the maintenance/electricity costs.

Wouldn't the voice calls also cost whatever the market would bear, as you assert for text messages, and if not, why is this a special case?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[rbarreira]

It's not really true that the cost is just the electricity. The more traffic the network has, the more and better base stations you need. This is infrastructure cost, but it may need upgrades, and definitely needs maintenance.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[corsec67]

The part of your email past the first question doesn't make it to the USA?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[theaveng]

>>>You're an idiot.

I pay $0 a month for my cellphone service, and I'm direct-billed at 18 cents per minute for calls, which is typically only 2-3 dollars each month. You pay what? Around $50 to $60 per month? Which one of us is the idiot? (just joking)

>>>Try http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/29/0044216&art_pos=1 The Greenlight example.

If the government steps-in to banish the Greenlight ISP, that's not a flaw of the free market. That's a flaw of government and that's who you should blame, not the marketplace. The problem is the politicians who don't know how to say "no" to corporations. It's too bad North Carolina doesn't have some kind of document, a constitution if you will, that specifically enumerates which powers the politicians can (and can not) exercise. Oh well. I guess I'm just dreaming. If such a thing ever existed, nobody pays any attention to it anyhow - just words on paper.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently not who those concepts originate from though...

Re:I'll Be Damned

[theaveng]

>>>In a free market, with healthy competition, the price of goods and services should fall to just above their actual cost.

Well let's see. You claim the cost per text is zero. Obviously that's not true since maintenance plus electricity for the towers costs money, but it's obviously quite cheap. So anyway..... my cellphone provider charges just 1 cent per text. That's about cheap as a plan can get, since you can't charge less than a penny (half-pennys were discontinued a long time ago).

>>>Or perhaps it could be run like the US Postal Service, in which case it would provide world-class service at a far lower price than any of its competitors.

(falls over laughing). hahahahahaahahaahaahahaaahaaahahaaaahahaahahaha! Whew. That was hiliarious. The U.S.P.S. is losing money year-after-year and only survives because of taxes drawn from out of our paychecks (see my previous post). And when I have something important to ship, I definitely don't use the government company. Instead I go to one of the private companies because (1) they cost less (2) they don't lose stuff and (3) if they did it's insured for free (upto $100). Oh and (4) they are the only ones who offer overnight package service; the government does not.

>>>just pointing out that services set up by the government aren't inherently inefficient as you seem to be implying

I can't think of a single government company that is as efficiently-run as its commercial counterpart.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[theaveng]

It's not a special case. Voice calls used to cost $1.00 a minute but most customers thought that was waaaay too high, so there's been a pressure to move that price lower-and-lower over time to around 20 cents per minute. That's the market in action.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[nomorecwrd]

Well, AFAIK, and according to a friend that works in the tech department of a BIG telco, they do put a lot of money for network enhancement, that is, voice and data. SMS is never an issue for enhancement, and always a surplus of the system itself.

Remember how at midnight, new year's eve your SMSs didn't used to arrive a few years ago and now they do?

Remember that you couldn't even make a call and now you do?

Ok. There is "some" cost for SMS exhange between carriers, but I bet it doesn't even average to 0.05ct per SMS.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

The flip-side of this is that money collected from all these texters helps subsidize my (and your) voice calls. I pay just 18 cents a minute, which is a real bargain considering wired phone calls in 1990 used to be 25 cents a minute. Simple inflation says the price should have increased to 45 cents, but instead prices have dropped and with the added benefit of being wireless. Without texting the voice calls would have to be significantly higher in order to cover the maintenance/electricity costs.

Actually, without texting, the price of a phone call would be more or less the same, since the price of cell phone service bears no relation to the cost of operating a cell phone network (except that the former is significantly higher than the latter).

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get your point. All I read was "I don't get your point. All I read was "I don't get your point. All I read was: "And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mr2001]

Well let's see. You claim the cost per text is zero. Obviously that's not true since maintenance plus electricity for the towers costs money, but it's obviously quite cheap. So anyway..... my cellphone provider charges just 1 cent per text. That's about cheap as a plan can get, since you can't charge less than a penny (half-pennys were discontinued a long time ago).

That's impressive. Who's your cell phone provider and what sort of package do you need to get that deal? The carriers I know of charge 15 to 20 cents per message (although you can get a discount on the first N messages with a package).

That was hiliarious. The U.S.P.S. is losing money year-after-year and only survives because of taxes drawn from out of our paychecks (see my previous post).

No, that's completely false. If someone told you that, they were lying.

"The Postal Service is a self-sufficient agency. The cost of postal operations, including the costs to extend service to an additional 1.2 million new deliveries in 2008, must be financed by the revenue generated from the sale of postal products and services." (link)

And when I have something important to ship, I definitely don't use the government company. Instead I go to one of the private companies because (1) they cost less (2) they don't lose stuff and (3) if they did it's insured for free (upto $100). Oh and (4) they are the only ones who offer overnight package service; the government does not.

And when you need to send a letter, return a warranty card, pay a bill... do you use FedEx or UPS? I sure hope not: it'd cost much, much more and probably be less reliable. Sending packages is one thing, but private companies simply cannot provide the same service as the USPS for regular mail.

I can't think of a single government company that is as efficiently-run as its commercial counterpart.

That's because you're deliberately ignoring the prime example.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[jcr]

They just happen to be the two business schools with whose alumni I've the most direct experience. I hear that MBAs from Duke and the University of Chicago are pretty good too.

-jcr

Re:I'll Be Damned

[fractoid]

I disagree. The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. This idea goes all the way back to John Smith, and is not necessarily tied to the actual cost of the good.

I think you and the GP are talking about subtly different things here. You're saying that the retail cost to the telcos is what the market will bear, as in (correct me if I misunderstand you) if the telcos don't charge what the market will bear then they make a loss compared to what they could be getting?

Whereas the GP was simply saying that implementing SMS doesn't add any overhead or require the telco to spend any more money (barring external messages etc, of course).

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll never understand why people feel the need to give instructions on how to use a telephone. Are you trying to sound demeaning?

Step 1: Pick up phone.

That is not helpful.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[fractoid]

Well let's see. You claim the cost per text is zero. Obviously that's not true since maintenance plus electricity for the towers costs money, but it's obviously quite cheap.

All of which the company has to pay for anyway. The text messages are sent at low priority over the metadata channel, so it literally doesn't cost them anything more to run the service than it would if they didn't. Unless you want to argue that the transmitter has to transmit for a few seconds longer per text (1kW transmitter, 5 seconds transmit time, 14c/kWh = 50 texts per cent).

So anyway..... my cellphone provider charges just 1 cent per text. That's about cheap as a plan can get, since you can't charge less than a penny (half-pennys were discontinued a long time ago).

Yes, yes they can charge less than a penny. Unless you have to physically put a coin in your telco's piggy bank every time you send a txt?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Rob the Bold]

No, I specifically remember you writing:

The flip-side of this is that money collected from all these texters helps subsidize my (and your) voice calls.

Now, contrast this with your statement about text costs:

The retail cost is whatever the market will bear. . . . and is not necessarily tied to the actual cost of the good.

So before you said texting costs what it does because of the market, but voice calls are subsidized by profits from texting. Now you've backpedaled, and said the voice price was the "market in action", rather than being subsidized by text profits.

Voice calls used to cost $1.00 a minute but most customers thought that was waaaay too high, so there's been a pressure to move that price lower-and-lower over time to around 20 cents per minute.

So I'll assume you've changed your mind about the text subsidy.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[daBass]

they do put a lot of money for network enhancement, that is, voice and data. SMS is never an issue for enhancement, and always a surplus of the system itself.

They still have to pay for the equipment somehow. People place a value on SMS, so they pay for it. If they made SMS free, they would lose that revenue stream and you'd pay more for the calls.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

And then after you become a giant, bloated corporation that becomes saturated from market share, and when your corporate mismanagement leads to your being a behemoth juggernaut of retarded decisions in order to keep a growth pace from the days before you plateaued, you can avoid the natural selection of the market -- bankruptcy -- and by lobbying the same Congress to throw bags and bags of taxpayer money into your company coffers, a significant portion of which will land in executive employee pockets, because "Why not? ... The company is fu(ked anyways!"

That's the beauty of the American system! Incompetence and greed held firmly in power by the scaffolding of the other half who believes in generosity for the sake of community health.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[soporific16]

You might call it a "ripoff" but it's a ripoff that customers *voluntarily* enter into.

Yes, you could describe it that way but that assumes there's nothing wrong with exploiting the ownership relationship. Most people don't have access to highly developed technology, and they certainly can't just "do it themselves", so they have to pay whatever is asked of them, as you so helpfully point out. But there is NOTHING voluntary about it. Of the group of people that would like to send text messages, there are some who are rich enough to consider the cost completely negligible and so can see no reason NOT to "voluntarily" pay the amount asked, and there's the rest of us.

Your comment appears completely valid if you cannot see, like i do, that capitalism is a system of exploitation and oppression, full of contradictions like we are seeing big time right now.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of an SMS is the cost of the technical people to support the platform that must also be paid for the run the system. So techincally it is not free, but usually a telco will recoupe the outlay in a matter of months. Then it is all profit. Here in New Zealand txt messaging is where the telcos make the bulk of their profits.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[fractoid]

Wait, you're saying they upgrade "non-guaranteed" services like SMS to handle peak times? Generally (where I live, anyway) you just don't expect your phone to work at any very-large gathering (Australia Day fireworks, we get a good 2-3 million people in an area about 5km across). Admittedly the last one I went to was a bit better but still took a few retries to send messages.

And I'd bet the upgraded capacity you're talking about is for calls, not just for texts, given the relative volumes (roughly equal) compared to the relative bandwidth required (one text is ~0.1 seconds of talk time).

Re:I'll Be Damned

[unitron]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

After 160 characters it's time to concentrate on your driving again.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[rishabhromit]

In India, SMS was free of charge too. Most telcos still have it. Some have/had offers like 100 msgs per day or 3000 per month free. Well maybe understandable since there are MANY subscribers. When I came to US, I was absolutely shocked to see that subscribers are charged for incoming messages (mine charges about 15c). How backward!! Customers 'voluntarily' accept n enter into this rip-off here.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[daBass]

I am and they do! Texts are a cash-cow, why wouldn't they upgrade? They wouldn't do that if it were free; you get what you pay for.

I don't think Telcos guarantee anything, anyway...

The upgrades work for all services at the same time, yes. But it is a shared piece of equipment, so in accounting you need to pay for your share. The cost of equipment and its maintenance is much higher than the cost of bandwidth required, so just using the amount of data used as a guide for how cheap SMS should be makes no sense.

Big gatherings are a different story. The reason your phone worked at all is because they wheeled in mobile towers, which is the norm for events. It doesn't make them much money directly, but indirectly, they don't want to be known as the one network that didn't work - it's the kind of thing that makes people churn when their contract is up.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[dudpixel]

I'm sorry, all I got was...

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone us

...and then i lost interest.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

my cellphone provider charges just 1 cent per text. That's about cheap as a plan can get, since you can't charge less than a penny (half-pennys were discontinued a long time ago).

Then why was I charged $1.919 per gallon when I filled my car with gas today?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes indeed the real cost of SMS should be Zero.As the secondary service channel in mobile systems gsm/cdma/whtever will exist because of its design whether you want sms or not as its actually meant to be "signalling/Sync channel"- sms has only been a later day addon. whether you want sms or not.

But what does involve the costs are costs of
1. SMSC
2. Interconnects
3. SMS Servers etc

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

SMS doesn't necessarily use signal (depending on your phone plan and phone technology), but this is irrelevant. SMS still requires a substantial infrastructure to store and forward messages to the nearest tower to your phone and to exchange messages between different service providers.

Even if you could only send messages between phones attached to the same tower there would still be infrastructure required for and dedicated to SMS messaging.

Certainly the cost of this infrastructure is vastly below the price most cellular providers charge, but that too is irrelevant. Is the price lower than the utility users' have for sending the messages? Considering the popularity of SMS messaging at "inflated" prices, I'd have to say no.

Welcome to economics 101.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[[Zappo]]

I've written application software for telco/carrier back ends, that's been deployed at carriers on every continent.

My layer sat on top of the infrastructure layer for SMS, but here's my best recollection from the internal training I got years ago.

Just like the article said, SMS was carried over the control path for call setup/takedown.

That path had very low bandwidth compared to the data (voice data, not IP data) path for calls. It was a control path and didn't need much. It was a limited resource with dedicated protocols and channels. Particularly in the early days of SMS, voice data was THE source of revenue for cell phones.

So using up the bandwidth in the control channel meant not being able to connect calls. There was a shortage of a precious resource whose over-use could strangle the primary flow of revenue to the carrier. So while the message itself was not expensive per se, it definitely was not without cost to the carrier. Carriers wanted to start exploring non-voice data services, and this gave them a way to get started without changing their existing network protocols and data flow, but they definitely had to be careful about how it was deployed and priced.

Of course telco pricing for ANYTHING is such a complicated market-driven competitive mess that there is an entire sub-industry of companies who keep track of all the special offers, plans, promotions, and whatnot that a given company has issued, knows which of its customers are in which plan, analyzes all the customer activity, and figures out who should be billed for what and how much. You're crazy if you think you can work out a "fair" price for a single element of telco service based on a guess of what it costs the telco to provide it.

At any rate, over time the carriers built up infrastructure around SMS, added IP gateways for the data that went over those dedicated control channels, added to their control channel capacity, etc., etc. Plus, in the US at least, SMS became and remained one of the most popular and steady data services among mobile users. All the major carriers in the US face significant business problems right now, and if they've got a small bright spot with predictable revenue at decent margins for a service folks like to use -- well, you can bet they're happy to have it and will charge what the market will bear (one way or another, in one plan or another, etc., etc.).

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so. There's a fixed throughput on this channel. And it's low, for CDMA it's 4800bps (with a 9600bps option), for GSM it's around 750bps. More SMS traffic? The phone company spends cash deploying more channels, essentially just to carry SMS traffic. There's a lot of equipment to route those millions of messages too, which costs money.

          Texting is still a collosal ripoff, but it's not zero cost.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Many countries had free SMS services as late as 2003. But the operators grew smarter as voice revenues reduced and people got used to texting each other rather than engaging in frivolous talk.The only way they found to increase ARPUs was to increase the cost of sms over a minute of call

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Skrynkelberg]

It's awfully glib to say we shouldn't be upset about being ripped off just because we have a choice. In a free market, with healthy competition, the price of goods and services should fall to just above their actual cost. That obviously isn't happening with SMS: customers would like to pay less, but no one is offering SMS for less, even though it costs almost nothing to provide. Doesn't that suggest a market failure?

I don't know about the US, but here in Sweden, a lot of mobile plans come with free SMS (up to a limit of 3000 per month or something like that). Also, often you can buy free SMS as an addition to a normal plan for ~$7 a month. It sounds like our market is ahead of yours?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Skrynkelberg]

That goes to show how far you read.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my... I don't like being a grammar Nazi...

but really, "flied" !!!????!!!

Re:I'll Be Damned

[ivucica]

Flied like birds. You see, I write a message, open my cell phone and let the message fly out like a dove on a parade ...

So I see no problem with my statement.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Aeron65432]

Simple inflation says the price should have increased to 45 cents, but instead prices have dropped and with the added benefit of being wireless. It's called innovation. Simple price inflation says that a terabyte of data should cost $2,000,000 given 1990 prices, but we know that isn't the case.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, often you can buy free SMS as an addition to a normal plan for ~$7 a month. It sounds like our market is ahead of yours?

Free SMS for $7 a month?! Wow, that's the cheapest free anything I've seen, and I've seen my share of free things!

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

While this is partially true - it's not the whole truth. Because sms uses the signalling channel it is possible for a deluge of text messages to shut down voice calls and data traffic. Charging for text helps control the traffic (mostly). I'm not disagreeing with the statement that sms is overpriced, just that the cost to operators is free.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost of SMS is not zero.
First, there is the cost of the SMS servers and support infrastructure to support all that packet data. This is not cheap.
Second, SMS is so popular in some countries that some voice channels at each cell tower are being allocated purely to carry SMS traffic. SMS packets do not ride "free".
However, I agree that in some countries, the telco's seem to charging too much for the service. In many Asian countries, the price for sending a domestic SMS is 2 cents per message.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[AcquaCow]

That's impressive. Who's your cell phone provider and what sort of package do you need to get that deal? The carriers I know of charge 15 to 20 cents per message (although you can get a discount on the first N messages with a package).

I have Verizon and pay $4/month for 400 txt messages...

That's $0.01/message.

And anyone in the US can get that.

  -- Dave

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. Formulating economic theory? And I thought John Smith was just that ass who married Pocahontas after dragging her back to the West....

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was as much as I could type while driving before I crashed.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[MaerD]

And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

TL; DR.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

except that while the USPS was ran by the government it operated at a net loss. It wasn't until it was spun off into it's own company separate of government meddling that the USPS turned a profit.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[commodore64_love]

>>>Yes, you could describe it that way but that assumes there's nothing wrong with exploiting the ownership relationship.

So? Some fool on Ebay paid me $30 for Final Fantasy 12... ten dollars more than current retail price. He didn't have to pay that much - the starting bid was only 99 cents, but he and others voluntarily chose to bid that high amount. If the customer got screwed, he did it to himself.

And getting back to texting, you don't have to text. It's not like food where you HAVE to text, or you'll die. You can choose, like I do, to just not participate in the texting hobby. It's a voluntary decision (unlike taxation which is forced).

Re:I'll Be Damned

[commodore64_love]

Those stats on 2008 are interesting but a blatant lie by the Postmaster (or his lackeys that maintain usps.gov).

I just googled the phrase "U.S. post office asks for bailout" and found story-after-story of the USPS asking Congress for additional funds. One article states they lost nearly 3000 million dollars in 2008. Not exactly what I call a "good example" of government efficiency in action, and just further proof why I do not want the government running companies. ---- Oh yeah, to answer your question, I do send letters by FedEx if they are important (i.e. tax returns). It's faster and safer and I get proof-of-delivery.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[commodore64_love]

>>>So I'll assume you've changed your mind about the text subsidy.

Not at all. The money collected from texting and voicecalls all goes into the same pot of money. Texting is being overcharged, but voicecalls are being undercharged, so in effect the excess money from the texting is subsidizing the voicecalls.

I'm not sure why I had to explain that. It seems as obvious as 2-2 == 0. I guess you're a little slow.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[nomorecwrd]

Here in Chile "calling party pays" applies, so that you never pay for anything received, including SMS.
You can even receive calls and SMS after a couple of months without paying your bill (outgoing calls are blocked within days overdue)
Same thing goes for prepaid cards. You can receive call up to 6 months since the last time you "reloaded".

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Flew? What are "flied", and why do they like birds?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess y... OOH DONUTS!

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Urkki]

It's not really true that the cost is just the electricity. The more traffic the network has, the more and better base stations you need. This is infrastructure cost, but it may need upgrades, and definitely needs maintenance.

Of course, but this applies to text messages, too. The more messages are sent, the more SMS specific infrastructure (like storage and routing hardware and software) needs to be bought and maintained.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't start me. I know any number of supposedly intelligent people who are apparently incapable of reading a simple email containing a series of questions or points.

They will respond to the first question, but anything after that is consigned to /dev/null.

Unless you start a sentence in the latter part of the email with "John said" That guarantees John will read it ans blast you for "misquoting" him, which is why I now refuse to take meeting minutes.

I swear I'm going to invest in an mp3 recorder and just email out the recorded file. Make your own fscing notes.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[slimjim8094]

Medicare is fun to talk about. They have a 1% overhead cost (meaning that 99% of 'revenue' is distributed to people, and only 1% is used in that process). Private insurers are about 15-20% overhead.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mr2001]

I have Verizon and pay $4/month for 400 txt messages...

That's $0.01/message.

Correction: that's $0.01 per message if you use exactly 400.

If you only use one, it's $4 per message.

And if you use more than 400, you pay an extra 20 cents for the 401st message (and each message after that).

Why is there no option to pay a reasonable per-message fee without having to commit to buy more messages than you actually use?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mr2001]

I just googled the phrase "U.S. post office asks for bailout" and found story-after-story of the USPS asking Congress for additional funds.

No doubt, but many of those are referencing the same recent request, which has not been granted. (Even if it had: does that mean every other company we've bailed out is no longer private?)

One article states they lost nearly 3000 million dollars in 2008. Not exactly what I call a "good example" of government efficiency in action, and just further proof why I do not want the government running companies.

Uh huh... because other private companies have never lost billions. Especially during the past couple years.

The point is, they're not losing our money. The USPS is funded by postage sales, not taxes.

Oh yeah, to answer your question, I do send letters by FedEx if they are important (i.e. tax returns). It's faster and safer and I get proof-of-delivery.

Faster? Sure, if you don't mind paying 50 times as much as the USPS charges, you can get it there in one day instead of two or three. (Unless you want it delivered on Saturday, in which case you'll pay extra!)

Safer? Not really. The USPS has a lower failure rate when you consider the staggering volume of mail they move every day.

Proof of delivery? The USPS offers that as an extra service, and you'll still pay a lot less.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[eugene ts wong]

That is so weird. I thought that it was just Chinese people.

I taught English in China, and I would often ask 2 questions at once, via IM or email. They often respond with only 1 word. I tried to teach a lesson on the proper response. 1 of the classes got the message, and got bored quick. 1 of the other classes just couldn't grasp the concept. I was stunned.

Thanks for sharing.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[weber]

I completely agree. I do this with my work e-mail.

However, lately I've considered setting up a bugzilla-server where each question is submitted as a bug assigned to the otherwise intended recipient, and set the nag-time to 1 day. My only worry is that it might seem a bit much. What's your take on this?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mattsson]

Just like the "real" cost of a phone call is also practically zero for the operator, as the extra electricity used for one call is basically nothing.

It is only zero if the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to make that call is zero.
The reason why SMS, in certain ways looking at it, is costless, is that it was made possible as a software-only addon the existing mobile infrastructure.
There is no extra cost to also deliver or receive SMS from a handset that already has the ability to make or receive calls, since the ability to make calls is dependent on the handshake-traffic that, as a side effect, also can deliver SMS.

Obligatory stupid analogy:
The UPS-guy delivering a parcel to you might give you a short oral message from someone whom he has picked up another parcel from without it costing UPS a tenth of a cent, if this message is short enough to not delay him.
Thus the cost of him delivering you this message was zero.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Urkki]

It is only zero if the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to make that call is zero.
The reason why SMS, in certain ways looking at it, is costless, is that it was made possible as a software-only addon the existing mobile infrastructure.
There is no extra cost to also deliver or receive SMS from a handset that already has the ability to make or receive calls, since the ability to make calls is dependent on the handshake-traffic that, as a side effect, also can deliver SMS.

Obligatory stupid analogy:
The UPS-guy delivering a parcel to you might give you a short oral message from someone whom he has picked up another parcel from without it costing UPS a tenth of a cent, if this message is short enough to not delay him.
Thus the cost of him delivering you this message was zero.

If SMS messages could be sent only to handsets within the same network cell, then that analogy would apply. However, in reality it's a different UPS guy who hears the message, and a different delivery guy, possibly working for a different delivery company, possibly in a different country, possibly a week later, that must deliver the message to intended recipient. Now does it still sound like it should be a free service?

SMS isn't a software-only add-on to mobile networks, it also needs the hardware to store the messages while they wait for delivery. And then it needs the contracts between operators to make the delivery work inside a country, and then roaming agreements to make the delivery work worldwide.

The operators must pay the network infrastructure maker to have the SMS capability, when they buy the network. It's quite natural that the network company doesn't develop the SMS capability for free, and quite natural that the network operator does want to make profit when they invest in SMS capability.

And also sending SMS messages does cause extra traffic that would not happen without the SMS. I'm pretty sure the handset and the base station don't talk to each other every second because it would eat the handset battery. Yet SMS messages are usually delivered in a second. Therefore they must cause extra traffic, ie. they are not sent piggybacking other control messages.

I don't really see any point of view where user-to-user delivery of SMS messages could be considered "free".

Re:I'll Be Damned

[LunaticTippy]

What provider are you using? I am with virgin mobile right now and am pretty happy. I get $.18 minutes but I need to add $20 every 90 days, making it cost about $6.66/month minimum. The money accumulates, so if I go on a trip I can blow $50 talking and not worry about it.

Back on topic, mobile phone companies aren't a very good example of a pure capitalist market. There is the artificial (but necessary IMHO) monopoly of spectrum, the large barriers to entry, not to mention the dominance of carriers that started out in the even-less-pure land telecom markets and still benefit from those arrangements.

I don't follow the market closely, but it seems there are only a few major players left and they all have suspiciously similar offerings and price structures.

My biggest complaint about mobile phones in the US is the handset subsidy that you pay whether or not you upgrade all the time. I would rather use a carrier where you buy your handset at full price on an open market and then can change carriers at will. This artificial lock-in seems to inhibit competition.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[LunaticTippy]

Why such an idiotic arrangement? What if I only want to send a few or a dozen a month? I don't want to spend $.25 each, and I don't want to spend $4 whether or not I send any. Also, if you go over 400 you probably are back at the $.25 price again.

Imagine buying power or water that way. Oh, kWH are $2.50 each unless you buy the 100 plan for $50. Go over 100 and they are $2.50. Better get the 200 plan for $70.

Oh well. They're trying to sell internet that way. They already sell minutes and TV that way.

Re:I'll Be Damned

[kundziad]

Well, not really. Phone calls are not obligatory packets that have to be send for the communication network to function, so they certainly create the need for more computational power. Case study: emergency, New Year's Eve - remember your mobile operator's performance then? So the more phone calls are made, the more the operator has to pay for maintaining the network (more hardware).

And although text messages are zero cost for the operator, they need to charge for their services in order to cover permanent costs such as hardware upgrades, data centers maintenance, infrastructure improvements, commercials, customer service etc.

Shifting the coverage of these costs only to phone call charges would be... weird?

Re:I'll Be Damned

[Mattsson]

I quote myself as an answer to your post: "in certain ways looking at it"

no, its because 160

[circletimessquare]

is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 16*10

all of us techies straddle these two worlds. 160 is our numerology of frustration, the techie 666

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

it also happens to be precisely 2 lines of text on a good old 80 character wide terminal.

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 0xF*10

fixed that for you

Re:no, its because 160

[SgtPepperKSU]

is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 0xF*10

fixed that for you

Are you joking?
0x10*10...

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

Fail. 16 is 0x10.

Re:no, its because 160

[jellomizer]

80 characters (bytes) just happened to be how many punched you can normally fit on a standard punch card.

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

math fail... slashdot before my second cup of office coffee (ie the crappy kind) is a bad idea... i'll hand in my geek card on the way out.

Re:no, its because 160

[Rary]

is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 16*10

all of us techies straddle these two worlds. 160 is our numerology of frustration, the techie 666

Now where the hell did Slashdot's 120 character sig limit come from?

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean 0x10 * 0x0a?

Re:no, its because 160

[wastedlife]

The number of characters that can be printed across CowboyNeal's buttocks. He has a very long yet narrow ass that contains a tattoo of every sig in slashdot.

Re:no, its because 160

[smitty97]

0xFA1L

Re:no, its because 160

[RazzleDazzle]

Duh, it is precisely .75 times as large as the 160 text message limit. QED.

Re:no, its because 160

[The Evil Couch]

That means that 160 characters makes perfect sense! You'd get 160 characters if you used both sides of the punch card!

Re:no, its because 160

[Tetsujin]

is the bastard offspring of the union of the hexdecimal and the decimal, literally 0xF*10

fixed that for you

Are you joking?

"fixed that for you" seems to be one of those phrases now doomed to be used only when someone actually is joking...

Re:no, its because 160

[pwfffff]

Why bother to sub a 1 for the I if you're just going to go nuts with an L at the end?!

Re:no, its because 160

[earlymon]

The number of characters that can be printed across CowboyNeal's buttocks.

Just for that, I'm going to get a tattoo of a W on each cheek. That way, I can just bend over and respond to posts about CowboyNeal's ass - WoW -

And if you don't like that, I'll stand on my head and call for my MoM -

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he wants it to be a long int. Are you sure this is the correct website for you?

Re:no, its because 160

[waddleman]

It's a long fail.

Re:no, its because 160

[dgatwood]

Or FA1ULL if you really want to draw it out.

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but most importantly, after all MAP header information and encoding your 8-bit ASCII into the 7-bit GSM 03.38 alphabet, 160 characters is exactly how many characters you can fit into a single ITU TCAP frame.

All that other stuff in the article is nice fluff. I suppose there's no real reason why they couldn't have decided SMS could be longer, but as he does mention in passing towards the end, it was supposed to be simple & cheap. Using up only a single frame helps.

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! That's how you mess with 'em! Insert random symbols into a binary num... oh wait. I see wait you did there. What was the topic again?

Re:no, its because 160

[plover]

I'm actually laughing out loud at this one! Thanks!

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

Fail.

0x10.0xA (0xA0).

Feel free to whoosh me whenever.

Re:no, its because 160

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's a Long 0xFA1

Re:no, its because 160

[L4t3r4lu5]

"Best Nerd Joke Ever" Award goes to...

Re:no, its because 160

[SgtPepperKSU]

The GP post made the mistake that 16=0xF. The parent post corrected that. I don't see how that is a fail...

Why text messages instead of email?

[loshwomp]

The real question should be "Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?" All of my friends in Japan regularly do full-on email on their phones, and only have a vague-if-any notion of what a regular "text message" is elsewhere. 160-character limit? That is *so* 1990s.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the majority of US cellphone users still can't access internet on their phones...

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[ironicsky]

Thats because the majority of Internet Providers restrict their users from sending email from relaying off network to their network. These same providers refuse to enable authenticated SMTP to fix the problem of open relays.

Luckily my cell phone provider, Rogers, in Canada has a mobile SMTP server accessable from the cellular network only specifically for the purpose of relaying SMTP from mail accounts configured on smart phones.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Krneki]

Because you can charge for SMS, while emails needs full Internet access. And they don't want to give us cheap Internet access.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Sockatume]

The account's set up with your phone number, uses the same user identifier, travels with the phone number, and there's a billing infrastructure for it. Meanwhile the vast majority of phone users don't even have packet data plans. It's operator inertia, basically.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[drsquare]

Because phone Internet access is incredibly expensive compared to text messages. Japan isn't a good example, they love any expensive gimmick.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Speare]

I think the Japanese and Chinese markets have completely ignored the SMS thing because of the character sets involved. If 160 latin characters can be compressed into about 128 bytes, how many hanzi can fit? Maybe forty? That's probably enough for some thoughts like "Meet you at train station at 11am" but nothing really more complicated than that.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[FredFredrickson]

I laughed a little when I read your comment. Stupid USA, no internet on their cell phones! Get with the times.

It occured to me shortly after, that I don't have internet on my cell phone either. A sad truth.

Interestingly, quite a few companies all have a vested interest in keeping society from progress. I mean, just a few articles back, we had an example of the newspaper industry just not getting it. My gut feeling? Wouldn't it make sense, instead of a billion different newsbook-readers, each for it's own brand of newspaper, just let me get my news on the cell phone?

And suddenly I see the problem- we don't have internet on our phones because NOBODY wants us to have the access that snuck up on US companies.

Corporations wildly mis-underestimated how the internet would take off. Instead of investing in it then, or learning from their mistakes, they're not investing in it now. So we still have companies fighting the internet. Even the internet companies are fighting us having internet.

Too late though, cat's out of the bag, and once you've seen it, you can never go back. I will never settle for a dumbed-down version of the internet, and going back to buying CDs (I buy mp3s) and purchasing cable (I watch hulu, and rent netflix).

Once we ALL have email on our internet enabled phones, we won't be able to be charged for each txt message. The internet is a pipeline, we can use email, IM, twitter, or whatever we please to communicate. This will be the undoing of the txt addons in the same way internet TV has/will ruin subscription cable.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[sorak]

The real question should be "Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?" All of my friends in Japan regularly do full-on email on their phones, and only have a vague-if-any notion of what a regular "text message" is elsewhere. 160-character limit? That is *so* 1990s.

Because email is free, and phone companies control the devices.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[XxtraLarGe]

"Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?"

I can't speak for everybody, but I use a Tracfone. Talking costs $.10 a minute, but text messages only cost me $.03 per message. I pay $6 per month for my phone (it's mostly for emergencies), and communicating by text message helps to spread out the amount of use I can get each month. One thing that's even better is the fact that my wife or I can text each other from our e-mail. It's easier if I'm at the store and my wife texts me to pick up eggs, milk, what-have-you, so I'll only use $.03 to get the same message I would have had to stop and answer the phone for $.10.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[GigG]

Not on the average cell phone it isn't.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Penguin Follower]

My ISP has SMTP authentication enabled. :) Earthlink.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[sopssa]

I wouldn't say its exactly expensive. I have unlimited 5mbit 3g and it costs 30e/month. unlimited 256kbps goes for something like 5e/month.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Sockatume]

I should clarify that I mean the SMS account here. If email was set up the same way, people would switch.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Lumpy]

Because the packet data plans are insanely overpriced!

In the usa it's all about raping the consumer.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[xgr3gx]

So true. Europe is years ahead of the US for cell service, and Japan, forget about it.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[julesh]

If 160 latin characters can be compressed into about 128 bytes, how many hanzi can fit? Maybe forty?

Probably more like 64; two bytes is usually enough to represent just about anything. A clever encoding scheme might squeeze as many as 80 in. OTOH, each of those characters carries more information than a single character of English text. Not sure about Japanese, but most common Chinese words are only two characters long, so being able to include fewer characters shouldn't be a real issue.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Aladrin]

128, at least, assuming UTF8. And the Japanese can say things a lot more compactly than we can:

èããY - I woke up.
åå¾OEãé£Yãã¾ã--ãY - I ate in the afternoon.
éf½éYã®åé"ãé話ã'ã--ã¾ã(TM) - I am talking on the telephone with my friend in Tokyo.

(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[ben0207]

You PAY to RECEIVE calls or messages? What century is this?

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[afidel]

I don't know about that, just earlier today I was reading a post from a slashdotter from Norway that said cellphone modem connections don't count as broadband by some technical definition yet the Verizon Rev A, AT&T 3G and Sprint 3G (not to mention their pilot 4G) network all fit his definition. Cost is still high, especially when you consider the low 5GB caps but with a modern smart phone the US networks are plenty advanced. Personally I love an OS 4.5 Blackberry and Safari on the iPhone 3G is very cool for pages that Opera mini doesn't parse well.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[ubercam]

My provider (MTS, in Manitoba, Canada) allows me to send/receive texts to/from email addresses. While they are limited to the size of regular texts, for billing purposes they also count as one. Just send a short email to [10DigitNumber]@text.mts.net. It's not a full email client or anything, but it's perfect for my needs and I use it all the time. The only downside is that MTS unfortunately doesn't split up texts that are too large. Incoming ones just get cut off, outgoing ones don't even get sent.

On the DSL side of things, they don't have authenticated SMTP either, but I believe they restrict access to their IP block. For everyone else there's webmail.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[SolarCanine]

Mod +1 Insightful, not Flamebait, you insensitive mod!

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[BrokenHalo]

Because the majority of US cellphone users still can't access internet on their phones...

I won't comment on the US, but it doesn't take a huge technological leap to be able to access the internet at least by means of GPRS, which is plenty good enough for general email.

Trouble is, unless you have a comparatively expensive and bulky mobile device, it tends to be incredibly cumbersome to access email or anything else on the internet. The majority of normal phones tend to require overmuch prodding of buttons and squinting at undersized screens.

However, unless you have a lot to say (in which case you might as well just make a phone call), 160 characters isn't actually a bad limit for instant messages. It is usually sufficient to get a reasonably complex point across so long as one isn't unduly prolix.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[ivucica]

You know, you can string together several messages and all modern phones support that - they split and merge the messages. You, of course, get charged separately for each segment of the message...

And don't you dare use non-7bit characters! No sir. Just dare using your national letters (e.g. Croatian) and bang! Only one character from your language (e.g. Ä) and number of chars that fits in the message shrinks in a horrible and twisted way.

Which means, an oversight (typing à instead of o) means message starts spanning e.g. 3 messages instead of 1. And the price grows appropriately.

So ... SMS is a two-sided sword. But you can't count on anyone in my country to read their mail on the run. Simply expensive.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[ivucica]

PS Slashdot isn't encoding-friendly either. I typed c with a v above and I got Ä. I typed o with a ' above and I got Ã.

:(

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[timeOday]

When my wife calls my tracphone on her tracphone, I pay to send *and* receive, simultaneously, and the rate for minutes in low volume is 33 cents per minute - so it's 66 cents per minute. Except 80% of the time you get an answering machine instead of whoever you were trying to call, so you pay for a full minute (33 cents) to leave a 5 second voicemail.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[MadCow42]

A few things

- because SMS uses the secondary data channel for traffic, it's actually more reliable, especially in an emergency. Next time you can't get phone service due to weather/outages/traffic/hurricane/etc, send an SMS instead. Your phone will also queue the message automatically until it can get a signal/channel.

- I lived in Europe, and SMS was used extensively for business as well as personal uses. It's viewed as a more time-urgent way to communicate than email. Now that Blackberries are common it's not used as much, but still used for stuff that needs attention NOW.

MadCow.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[BrokenHalo]

Well, how do they work it then? Don't Japanese or Chinese phones have the same 12+ buttons that us anglophones have? I'm not arguing, just curious.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anawrahta]

I can assure you the Chinese market has not ignored SMS. SMS is probably even more popular a method of communication than actually talking on the phone. Why? It's cheaper. And as mentioned in this thread, lots can be said with only a few characters. For example in English it takes 13 characters to say "have you eaten?", in Chinese it only takes 4. ()

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely false. Texting is very common in China and Japan.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[MightyYar]

Someone has to pay, right? In the end it makes no difference who pays. In Europe, it makes sense to make the caller pay because Europeans generally only have to remember a couple of prefixes for their country. Each country has a (more ore less) fixed rate to call a mobile number, so things are predictable. In the US, this would get ugly fast since we are much more likely to call across state lines... we'd have too many numbers to remember. We could completely overhaul our communications system and force everyone over to a few mobile-only exchanges, but that would piss everyone off and probably screw up price competition since you would have to standardize rates.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[SupremoMan]

You PAY to RECEIVE calls or messages? What century is this?

Good 'Ole 20th century.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 42nd.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[vigour]

Corporations wildly mis-underestimated how the internet would take off.

Who are you? Dubya?.

Well, there's always the test

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[TheRaven64]

Kanji is much denser than English text. You need a minimum of 4 characters plus a space per word in English (the average is closer to 5-6, meaning 7 bytes - 5.25 octets with a 6-bit byte). In contrast, a lot of common words in Chinese or Japanese need only one or two ideographs. These can all be represented in a 16-bit character set, and probably closer to 14 bits. This means that the 1024-bit header for SMS can carry something like 70 words in Japanese or Chinese, but only about 25 in English.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because txt messages and email are different? My friends txt me when they want to reach me quickly iwth a brief message: "I'm parking now, be there in 5 minutes" or "I can't make dinner until 7:30".

They know that I will pick up my txt messages within minutes. But my email box is cluttered with many other messages, so I don't have my phone notify me when I get an email, so it could be hours until I read an email.

So a txt is great for a brief time critical message. I get so much email (not even including spam), that I don't want to be notified every time I get an email.

How do the Japanese handle this?

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh sure, and "Information wants to be free" and "They can't control the Internet" and "We'll form a commune" and "DeBeers can't possibly keep this up for more than a couple years". You imagine a utopia. Utopia is impossible.

A Reagan administration study proved this.

Not to mention you don't understand how the Internet works, nor how laws work.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in Korea, I can fit 90 characters in a text message. Whether I use English or Korean is up to me - it's certainly more space efficient to use Korean, since one Korean 'character' is actually a whole syllable.

Most phones that I've seen here will simply switch automatically between an SMS and a 'long message' of 2000 characters. I haven't figured out if those are more expensive, though, since my Korean's not good enough... :P

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

A text message is 140 bytes, so it can contain 70 16-bit Unicode characters (one of the encodings supported by SMS). That's of course significantly less than the 160 characters in 7bit Latin encoding, but on the other hand the "information density" per character is higher (one character often being one word, AFAIK).

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Chabil Ha']

I like it, as I do Twitter, because it forces people to be brief and concise in their communication.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Patch86]

My SMS is free (up to a limit that I could never reach, and pretty cheap after that) as part of my phone contract, and my (pretty basic) phone ignores the 160 limit by sending multiple messages/piecing together split incoming messages behind the scenes. My SMS "account" is also tied to my phone number, meaning only having to give out one number to everyone for them to contact me (and vice versa).

On the other hand, a data plan for my phone is pretty expensive, and e-mail accounts are independent of phone numbers doubling the number of contacts for my address book.

SMS still sounds like the better option of the two for my phone handset. The day phone contracts come with a free email account integrated into my phone number is the day that that changes.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

and going back to buying CDs (I buy mp3s)

I buy both. I do not care. I want mp3's. But if the CD is 5 bucks cheaper (which it usually is used), CD it is then...

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)

I could never figure out why the main Slashdot site garbles all 2-byte character sets, since clearly the Slashcode itself can handle it.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of my friends in Japan always, every friggin waking moment, train ride, lunch break, class, on the toilet,funeral, insert action here do full-on email on their phones, and only have a vague-if-any notion of what a regular "text message" is elsewhere.

There fixed that for you.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I like the text limit. It forces people to condense their thoughts. Too many people just whine on in email. Get to the freaking point.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Targon]

There are uses for instant messages and there are uses for e-mail. It isn't only about devices that do not have proper e-mail support, it is about two very different ways to communicate.

For example, if you ever run into the problem of too many messages being in your voicemail box, have people send their number as a text message. E-mail tends to include a lot of junk mail/spam, and the signal to noise ratio is very low for many people. So, sending a text message makes sense.

Now, there are also reasons for using an IM vs. e-mail even on a computer. If you just want to see if someone is available, a quick, "Hey, are you busy?" message makes a LOT more sense than calling, making them pick up the phone, answer, and then answering your question. In the same way instant messaging isn't the right tool for an extended conversation, e-mail isn't the right tool for a lot of communication that goes on.

There is a reason the old Nextel system was and is used by many people. It is because it is basically a voice version of instant messaging. When all you need is a quick answer to a quick question, why bother with a full voice message or e-mail if waiting for the response will make any answer obsolete?

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[jabithew]

This is reminding me of Shannon Entropy. I'm guessing human thought contains a similar amount of bits whether it's expressed in Chinese (high bits/character) or French (low bits per character).

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that W quote is so funny is that he was referring to others mis-underestimating him, as in, "If you think I'm stupid now, just wait till you see how dumb I really turn out to be!"

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[jabithew]

Thinking about it, the extended-roman texts are 128bits and contain 160 characters. That works out as 0.8bits/character, within Shannon's estimated range for English (0.6-1.3).

Interesting, no?

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[SnarfQuest]

Maybe they could squeeze more in if they limited to upper case letters only, or maybe if they printed them smaller. The could also cut spaces in half, it should still be readable.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Aphoxema]

It's operator inertia, basically.

That kind of spooked me there, my website/filehost is operationinertia.org

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)

I could never figure out why the main Slashdot site garbles all 2-byte character sets, since clearly the Slashcode itself can handle it.

The dot-org site is run under an encoding of ISO-8859-1, while the dot-jp site tells browsers that it's UTF-8.

So when the high-bit bytes come in, they're treated "properly" on one site but not the other.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[ChrisMaple]

To shorten your English samples:
I woke up. -> I woke.
I ate in the afternoon. -> I lunched.
I am talking on the telephone with my friend in Tokyo. -> I'm phoning my Tokyo pal.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[lenester]

Not to mention you don't understand how the Internet works, nor how laws work.

He did understand how the "Login" link at the top of the page works, though. Oh, and provided a vague line of reasoning and observation to back his conclusions.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[XxtraLarGe]

When my wife calls my tracphone on her tracphone, I pay to send *and* receive, simultaneously, and the rate for minutes in low volume is 33 cents per minute - so it's 66 cents per minute

You're not doing it right. You can get a tracfone for $30 with free double minutes, then sign up for a family value plan. One person gets 50 minutes for $9.99, and each additional person gets 30 minutes for $5.99. With a double minutes phone, you're getting 100 & 60 respectively. Once you're on a family value plan, you can then opt for extra minute bundles (50 minutes for $10), so with double minutes you're getting your calls for $.10 a minute. We pay $28 per month for 4 of us to have phones. If the kids need more minutes, they pay for it themselves.

Except 80% of the time you get an answering machine instead of whoever you were trying to call, so you pay for a full minute (33 cents) to leave a 5 second voicemail.

Sounds like a great reason to use text messaging :-)

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Jerry Smith]

I don't know about that, just earlier today I was reading a post from a slashdotter from Norway that said cellphone modem connections don't count as broadband by some technical definition yet the Verizon Rev A, AT&T 3G and Sprint 3G (not to mention their pilot 4G) network all fit his definition. Cost is still high, especially when you consider the low 5GB caps but with a modern smart phone the US networks are plenty advanced. Personally I love an OS 4.5 Blackberry and Safari on the iPhone 3G is very cool for pages that Opera mini doesn't parse well.

Broadband is on one hand defined as a multiplex connexion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier T1 for instance, on the other the FCC defines it as a >200 kbit connection (either up or down). OT, but hopefully informative.

(NOT posting as AC, and proud of it)

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not, they use email from their phones...at least in Japan

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic Japanese uses two identical syllabaries, which have roughly 50 syllables made up of a consonant and the vowels (i.e. A I U E O, Ka Ki Ku Ke Ko, Sa Shi Su Se So...). Japanese also uses Chinese characters.

To type a word on a computer, all a user does is type the syllables and use the key to convert to Chinese characters (on PCs, this is the space bar as Japanese has no spaces).

From what I've seen, this is done similarly on cell phones, with each button corresponding to a group of syllables starting with the same consonant.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[mwc223]

Although email is extremely quick is still requires loading unlike text messages, but as mentioned, text messages conveniently cut off at 160 characters when you are trying to send a message that is 163 characters. Come on 4G get here already.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the packet data plans are insanely overpriced!

In the usa it's all about raping the consumer.

Check out Canada's data plans some time. USA data plans are dirt cheap by comparison.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[zindorsky]

Worth noting:

UTF-16 is much better than UTF-8 for encoding asian scripts. UTF-8 needs 3 bytes per code point in that range, while UTF-16 needs only two.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect it's the mysql database backend. If the tables are ISO-8859-1, the alter table statement to "upgrade" to UTF-8 would probably take a week to run. Additionally, UTF-8 does come with a rather hefty performance penalty (depending on the operation).

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[dotgain]

Probably more like 64; two bytes is usually enough to represent just about anything.

640 deci-Kanji ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[earlymon]

The real question should be "Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?"

Because I can send "Call me" in an SMS and all they have to do while reading the message is to hit send to call me?

All of my friends in Japan regularly do full-on email on their phones, and only have a vague-if-any notion of what a regular "text message" is elsewhere.

All of your friends in Japan have a completely different enculturation with cell phones, going back to the HandyPhone, from back when the whole notion was just a wet dream for Americans. Further, their data systems are many and varied - as are their usage costs. Email is standard transport, regardless of location in Japan or your service provider.

Japan is about speed, efficiency and cool. Email is all of those - there.

My opinions are based on my Japanese friends and my limited use of cell phones there.

That is *so* 1990s.

So is Shawn Colvin's A Few Small Repairs and B.B. King's Deuces Wild - your point?

PS - not ragging ya - rock on.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Krneki]

thanks

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[David_W]

I ate in the afternoon. -> I lunched.

Verbing weirds language.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Krneki]

I use Skype for SMS. Usually the price is 0.08E per 160 char message. + full sized keyborad - You need a PC / laptop / netbook - WiFI connection. Still fully useful at office / home. And I bet you could find even cheaper offers.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[dotgain]

What, you wanted all eight bits of those octets? The top two bits are the expensive ones, we'll have to charge you 80c/SMS for that.
Regards, Your Carrier

/shuffles off to check baby in oven...

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[feepness]

Yes. My $15 a month really feels like rape.

Call me when you've paid property taxes at some point in your life.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[kindbud]

Why text instead of IM?

Why do they sell me a phone that can run a multi-protocol IM client, only to pipe those messages over the SMS network instead of my data plan, and charge me SMS rates for it? Stupid. Now I don't have a use for my data plan - cancelled! And I don't send very many texts or IMs - cancelled the text plan, too. Good job!

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[SlashDotDotDot]

'To lunch' has been a legitimate verb far longer than people have been, *ahem*, texting.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[chthonicdaemon]

Too many numbers to remember? Who remembers numbers anymore?

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[BrookHarty]

>I laughed a little when I read your comment. Stupid USA, no internet on their cell phones! Get with the times.
>It occurred to me shortly after, that I don't have internet on my cell phone either. A sad truth.

My cellphone runs Linux and has internet connectivity.
I have ssh, RSS reader, twitter, and I can tether to my laptop for 3G.

Android G1 on T-mobile, one of the best multifunctional phones out. If it had a good low light and high pixel camera, longer battery life, it would be perfect. IMHO.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Taco, in his infinite wisdom, chose to block almost all unicode characters instead of only the RTL "character".

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[radish]

Because very few people have reliable push email on their phones, but everyone has SMS. Text messaging also tends to be better integrated into the phone's display etc.

Example: At the mall with my wife I text something like "meet me @ car in 5 mins". I know she'll get that message pretty much right away, unless she's out of coverage. I also know her phone will make a noise/vibrate and when she looks at it the full text of the message will be displayed on the screen (not buried in an app/menu). Sure there's nothing stopping you adding that functionality to an email app, but it's more complex. You'd need whitelisting, as there's no way I want my phone to make a noise every time I get an email from just anyone. You'd also need push, obviously, and something which displayed the messages on the home screen. All possible, sure, but not there yet - and certainly not on regular (non smartphone) handsets. For $5 a month SMS is convenient to use and I know it just works on basically every handset out there.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[inasity_rules]

Its not often I get to be a smug bastard so go easy on me. Here in a falling apart economy in the 3rd world, I have internet on my cell phone. Being a test user, I got it early.. Its actually easy to implement on a GSM network.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

yourphonenumber@yourwirelessprovider.com
usually does the trick just fine.

No, you don't need internet access you already have it linked in with your providor. They will, however, almost always truncate your emails down to the SMS limit.
This is because they have decided to save money by squeezing SMS's into system signalling instead of just running it over some type of data plan.

But I agree with other people here- what is the deal with twitter anyhow? I find it highly irritating personally- let's take something like email and make it smaller & less useful!

My real beef with Twitter is that it has convinced a lot of people that they don't need to have email on their phones. If not for that, the cell phone companies would be bleeding customers to the providers who bundeled email &/or basic net access. As it stands, we just see even longer delays in getting online.

Perhaps the solution would be a government mandate that cell frequencies be used for a generic internet access type only, and if they want to sell you phone that would be like a VOIP over cell-based internet. Which is essentially what it is now.
Or in other words, the governmentS (emphasis on the plural) need to get together and say "hey, you can sell data access, but it has to be sold separate from services like phone and other media"

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need a minimum of 4 characters plus a space per word in English

Oh?

Is it rly tru?

Didn't thnk so.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[timeOday]

Thanks. It doesn't sound like the family plan reduces the per-minute charges any, but it does reduce the minimum monthly purchase for all but the first phone. I wish they would give you break when calling another phone on your plan though, you'd think in-network calls are cheaper for them.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

One good reason for SMS is that because of it's low bandwidth it works in many places where you can't place a phone call or use internet access. Near where I live on Vancouver island there was a small plane crash, and one of the survivors tried to call for help from his cell phone, but was initially out of service range - however his SMS message went through fine and help arrived quickly. He was later able to make voice calls from another location:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/08/03/bc-missing-plane.html?ref=rss

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Hymer]

Actually we do not have a 160 char limit... that is the limit for a single SMS, most phones can send (and receive) up to 600 char SMS by sending more than one message.
...and most places in the world a SMS is far cheaper than an email unless you are on an flat rate UMTS network (which is what they use in Japan).

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[jabithew]

Stop verbing nouns!

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[shutdown -p now]

In the usa it's all about raping the consumer.

But hey, it's free market - you get to choose who gets to rape you, in what position, and how much you're willing to pay for the privilege!

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[XxtraLarGe]

Per minute charges for us are only $.10 a minute because we all have double minute phones. In addition to emailing text messages, our tracfones have a local exchange number, so calling from my home phone to my tracfone is a free call, and you only get charged one way. If your local tracfone service area is under Alltel, you can send e-mail using "yourphonenumber@messages.alltel.com", so receiving text messages is only $.03 to receive and then when you reply it goes back to their e-mail. All-in-all, I find it to be pretty inexpensive, and I don't have to deal with any contracts, which is nice. Since I don't use my phone too often, it works out pretty well.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[tmosley]

It's not a free market when government interferes (regulates) to the extent that it is almost impossible to start a new phone company.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Urkki]

Although email is extremely quick is still requires loading unlike text messages, but as mentioned, text messages conveniently cut off at 160 characters when you are trying to send a message that is 163 characters. Come on 4G get here already.

Uh, get a newer phone. I don't know if it's just a Nokia thing, or more universal (I believe it is), but long SMS messages are supported. In practice the phone sends long text in many messages and with some codes, so the target phone can put them together again (and if it can't then it'll see them as separate messages, with a bit of garbage but completely readable). Completely transparent to the sender and mostly (depending on the phone) transparent to the receiver.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to go over there and vote on the polls since I live on the edge!

(Kinda the same way I pick out menu items at Japanese restaurants but luckily picking poll items doesnt mean I will starve)

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Altus]

Is that really English?

Didn't think so.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[4D6963]

Wouldn't that depend on the Huffman coding you'd use on those sets of characters? Surely you'd want to use that at some point because some characters are much more frequent than others?

Although it would ruin the concept of a known fixed message length...

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to just receive e-mail. I took a fairly new HTC Fuze and set my e-mail to send and receive every 2 minutes. The battery was gone in less than 8 hours, my normal setting is every 60 minutes and the life is much more reasonable (a few days).

My point is that since your phone has to receive the control channel anyway, there is no impact to battery life with getting a text message.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because they're too lazy to filter out special characters which can do things like reverse the text direction.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question should be "Why are we still using ancient text messages instead of regular email?" All of my friends in Japan regularly do full-on email on their phones, and only have a vague-if-any notion of what a regular "text message" is elsewhere. 160-character limit? That is *so* 1990s.

this aint japan fool

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, we call it "serving" the customer.

Sincerely,
Marketing

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[jrumney]

128 *BYTES* thr, fxd it 4 U.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Of course, the above won't come through correctly on Slashdot, but they are about half the characters of the English phrases.)

I could never figure out why the main Slashdot site garbles all 2-byte character sets, since clearly the Slashcode itself can handle it.

The page encoding isn't UTF-8.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn you! Damn you to hell! And here I've been avoiding getting the intertubes package :( . I feel like f**cking caveman now. I really just need a phone but I'm also a guy who keeps the fastest computers and such around but skimp on my cell phone :) .

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

I laughed a little when I read your comment. Stupid USA, no internet on their cell phones! Get with the times.
It occured to me shortly after, that I don't have internet on my cell phone either. A sad truth.

Please define "Internet on our cell phones". Do you mean reading internet email and web surfing on the device itself or maybe just being able to use it as a means of connecting to the Internet while using another device for the email/web access? The first I got only recently in the year 2000 when my employer said that his sysadmins need to be able to fix things anywhere and threw me a Nokia Communicator 9110. That other one was back in 1998. The Nokia device did help me many times when sitting at my favorite bar and getting alerts about servers not responding - "Bartender, please get me another beer while I restart Apache".
  Of course things have changed since 2000, back then we had only dial-up with a time-based fee and really slow downloads but nowadays you can get unlimited HSDPA for free when getting broadband to your home all for 40 euros per month.

Once we ALL have email on our internet enabled phones, we won't be able to be charged for each txt message. The internet is a pipeline, we can use email, IM, twitter, or whatever we please to communicate. This will be the undoing of the txt addons in the same way internet TV has/will ruin subscription cable.

Trust me, you will still be using the SMS service, if not for anything else but communicating with your mother who couldn't care less about tweeting with twitter or learning how to IM. All Internet-based options have also one big flaw: they require that your device is constantly connected and using the battery. Sure you can set up your phone to only get your emails a couple times per day but where's the fun in that? Isn't communication supposed to be real-time and whatnot these days? That is where SMS services do shine, even if they cost a few cents per message.
    In case you're wondering, I'm from Finland.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

With IMS on the phone (IP Multimedia System, read about it on wikipedia), the operator will charge for each IM message, like they do with SMS.

IMS will allow the operator to charge differently for different kinds of data while still allowing application developers to develop new applications for using this "general" purpose internet connection.

Operators have a huge interest in keeping our mobile terminals "stupid"; just like the classic telco network; all brains are in the network. It will fuck us as customers, but bring billions to the operators.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[CAIMLAS]

Texting is the best thing most people can -afford-. Your average person is not going to pay $100+ a month for what ultimately boils down to email and limited "I'm bored" web browsing on their =phone=.

When you combine the actual data rates, the price structuring of data plans, the software/hardware support required (and mostly lacking) for common web/email media, the price of the handheld, the advertised vs. realized data rates (and the amount of 'useless' data you get pushed to you while on a data plan, using up your expensive bandwidth).... it's not worth it.

I imagine that such things are more easily justifiable in a larger city. This makes sense, as Japan is, essentially, a larger city.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[CAIMLAS]

You realize, don't you, that it probably has something to do with the population density of the country vs. Europe? It costs more, per capita, to install wireless services with universal (or even acceptable) coverage. Cities and large towns are the exception in the US, whereas that's less the case in Europe.

And as another poster said, Canada is even worse. That couldn't have something to do with human population density, could it?

But, I do agree with you, in sentiment if not principle: data plans are too highly priced for most people to justify them - especially when they're used to being dicked around on billing and minutes. Yes, many, if not most people, still have to fight with providers who promise X and give them X-1, and then charge them an arm and a leg for that "1" on the bill.

I think part of it is that data is just gravy for the phone companies. They have extra bandwidth, so they might as well sell it; they can always use QoS to degrade it so voice gets through. But, they don't have so much extra bandwidth that they're able to offer it inexpensively - and doing so wouldn't be nearly as profitable, in terms of I/O (though it might be in total dollars). This works, so they stick with it.

And god knows they don't want to see the revenue from texting and per-megabyte data rates go away. $.10 a text, $1.25 per meg with Verizon, if they're not part of your plan ($5 and $50, respecitvely - thereabout). And it's very, very easy (as in, trivial) to throw an extra $100 onto your account with those overage costs when you don't know you're being charged them (even if you're not really using it but for personal self-communication, like forwarding directions to yourself so you don't have to print it out).

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

To shorten your English samples again, including text messaging shortenings:
I woke up. -> I woke. -> Up or Woke
I ate in the afternoon. -> I lunched. -> 8 Lrdy (ate already)
I am talking on the telephone with my friend in Tokyo. -> I'm phoning my Tokyo pal. -> Foning Tokio Clng Phil(or the name)

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont know the reason, but the encoding is different on the page of your example. /shrug

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[American Terrorist]

70 Chinese characters per text message. In China, at least. Keep in mind most simple sentences are not longer than 5-7 characters because most words average 1.5 characters in length. I can text much more information in Chinese than English.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[OolimPhon]

Not sure I agree with this. Every postal service in the world has figured it out. When was the last time the postman hammered on your door and asked you to pay for a letter you received? (Aside from an item that had too few stamps, that is.)

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

orly?

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[YourExperiment]

Because swearing in an email is nowhere near as much fun.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Zebedeu]

Apparently it's because there's some kind of control character which can reverse the order of the text.

I've seen examples on slashdot where trolls would post a comment with one of those characters and it would cause all of the following comments to appear right-to-left (sorry, I can't find the examples right now).

Now why they chose to ban unicode altogether instead of filtering the offending characters is beyond me.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[MightyYar]

The postal service doesn't have the nuances that a phone service does. For instance, usually you are buying something from someone, so they can just charge you for shipping along with the order. Letters tend to be a fixed rate that is regulated by the government, so there's no incentive for competition.

And they DO have pay-on-delivery. You never heard of POD? Google it.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[MightyYar]

LOL :) I don't mean that you need to memorize your address book. I mean you'd need to memorize rate schedules. Every prefix (in the US, "area code") could potentially cost a different amount of money. I could see two ways to solve it. First, a message telling you how much the call is going to cost, push some button to accept. Annoying. Second would be adding a new prefix that is just for mobile phones, which would require quite a bit of upheaval and would not exactly encourage price competition - instead the government would wind up setting prices or the carriers would have designated blocks of numbers. Either way isn't ideal for prices.

As an example, if I buy a pay-as-you go phone in the US I might be charged $0.33/minute for the WORST plan T-Mobile offers. As it happens, that is about what I pay when I call my friend in the UK on his mobile. So in the US, I can pay significantly less per call than is possible in the UK, even with the rip-off pre-paid plans. I have to assume that this is because of lack of competition?

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, though it's not always quite that simple. Mixed Asian/Latin text is quite common - think of HTML for example - and for the average web page, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript all using entirely Latin text, UTF-8 can easily end up producing more compact results than UTF-16 even if all the visible text is taking 50% more storage.

Re:Why text messages instead of email?

[LunaticTippy]

UcnDnsfyEngTxt2 It just sucks to read.

Lame Typing

[ironicsky]

And if you take in to account the lame typing abilities of today's Internet generation you could probably squeeze that under 100 Characters as all you need... I mean, "Hi wat u up 2?" or "Did u wanna come ovr 4 a movie 2night?" 160 Characters is overkill in my opinion :-) Mind you, my iPhone has no 160 character limit, I'm sure other smart phones just piece together the rapid recieving of messages in to one while the "dumb" phones display them in 160 character chunks.

Re:Lame Typing

[Achromatic1978]

You'd like to believe it was your Jesusphone being that intelligent, but in reality, the SMS standard has supported message concatenation for at least the last ten years, if not since its inception. My Nokia 2110e could turn it on and off, and you'd see the little counter for "remaining characters" go from 160 to 470 or so.

Re:Lame Typing

[Anonymous Coward]

the SMS standard has supported message concatenation for at least the last ten years,

You mean the GSM standard. CDMA doesn't support multipart SMS messages.

[Posted AC because i've already moderated]

Re:Lame Typing

[tomz16]

You mean the GSM standard. CDMA doesn't support multipart SMS messages.

Don't know how true that statement is in practice... every verizon (CDMA) phone I've ever used has done multipart SMS. I'm not sure whether this is implemented at the protocol level, or just concat'd in software after receiving a series of texts. Regardless, it's transparent to the end-user.

SMS vs email

[pieterh]

An exercise in cartel economics: compare the costs of SMS traffic vs. email traffic and explain the differences. :-)

Re:SMS vs email

[DaveV1.0]

2 words: Cellular towers.

Re:SMS vs email

[Rob Kaper]

Differences:

- SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings

- SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead

- SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs

- SMS is cheaper: most plans offer a sufficient amount of free messages a month for most users, e-mail requires an additional GPRS data plan

YMMV but SMS is not as bad as some people claim.

Re:SMS vs email

[Red Flayer]

While you're at it, compare the *revenues* from SMS traffic vs. email traffic.

SMS is a nice bridge product for the telcos; they get to capture a lot of revenue from people who will pay for SMS, but would not pay for an expensive data plan. Meanwhile, they can continue to charge high prices for data plans for people what want (or need) them.

Re:SMS vs email

[warlock]

Easy, SMS uses up signalling bandwidth on the cell tower, which is a relatively scarce resource, and when the signalling bandwidth is congested, no calls can take place, thus the company looses money/customers.

Re:SMS vs email

[Dan East]

Here's what's ridiculous. I have a Blackberry, and do not have an SMS plan with my carrier, thus each text costs me 25 cents to send. Receiving SMS is free and unlimited. I have an unlimited data plan for Blackberry, so I simply send emails using the carrier email SMS gateways for "free". The only downside is that the recipient cannot directly reply to my message. Here's the stupid part. The amount of bandwidth, processing, and inter-service gateways my emails have to pass through must require at least 100 times the resources of sending an actual SMS. The final kicker is that even if I keep my actual message under 160 chars, they are usually broken up into more than one SMS message because of the header attached by the SMS gateway that contains my email address, etc.

Re:SMS vs email

[CodingHero]

As mentioned in the article summary above, SMS also uses a channel that isn't used for much else other than miscellaneous call and signal strength data. It is also my impression that text messages have no guaranteed timeframe for delivery, as said miscellaneous data takes precedence. So it seems to me that since SMS takes advantage of facilities that would still exist in its absence, charging $0.20 per message (or even anything at all) is akin to a ripoff. See also: http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages/

Re:SMS vs email

[LordLimecat]

SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs

wouldnt the sender of spam have an unlimited texting account or use some email-to-text service?

Re:SMS vs email

[smallfries]

Well.... I haven't seen a 160 character limit in Europe for years because *every* handset automatically splits/reassembles arbitrary length messages. And the cost hasn't been a factor as I haven't seen a call-plan that charges for text messages in years either...

Re:SMS vs email

[drinkypoo]

Two words in response: Watermelon rutabaga.

My response is only slightly more inscrutable than yours. Care to explain how one or two packets being worth more than thousands of packets can be explained by the fact that all the data has to be carried by towers? Text messagers should be encouraged. You just ratchet up the base rate, and give away text messaging. That way you save money when people text, and they thank you for it. Then they do more texting, and you can use less-performant towers because you're carrying less data. The cellphone providers have driven people to use as many minutes as possible and then they want to charge us for it, which is why more and more people are looking for alternate phone services. The only reason we don't have THOSE is due to government collusion (there is no fucking way all these AT&T mergers should ever have been approved — why did we ever split up Ma Bell in the first place?)

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Emails sent as TCP/IP data over the same cellular network are a tiny fraction of the cost of an SMS, despite much higher overhead.

Typical pricing for packet switched internet connectivity is 0.24 EUR per megabyte, in 10kB increments, pay-as-you-go. (That's a rip-off. If you use the internet regularly, there are more economic plans.) Even if you don't spread the overhead over several mails (i.e. you connect to the internet, log in to the mail server with SSL, send one mail, log out and disconnect), that is still much cheaper than an SMS.

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the kicker here is that you are too cheap to pay $5/month for unlimited text messages, so you just offload the problem on others. The reciever of these messages pays twice, becuase your "free" method breaks the messages in two frequently. Also, the reciever cannot reply, so has to fish through their contact list to reply.

If you were my friend, I'd excommunicate you.

Re:SMS vs email

[LandDolphin]

So, you are telling us that sending and recieving text messages wit you is overly complicated so that you can save $5 on a plan that you probably alread spend ~$75 for.

/Glad I don't text you.

Re:SMS vs email

[BrokenHalo]

Perhaps a way around this might be to use your carrier's web2sms interface, if it has one. Or alternatively, I think I heard that there's a Skype client for Blackberry now. That might be another convenient way to send SMSs. Whatever works...

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

That's silly. Why would a company that fights so hard to get and keep customers want to loose them? They want to keep them, you semi-literate ape.

Re:SMS vs email

[MightyYar]

If you were my friend, I'd excommunicate you.

I'd give him $5.

Re:SMS vs email

[Luyseyal]

SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead

Like during SXSW when it took 30 minutes for me to receive text messages, but I could call people without a problem.

SMS is cheaper: most plans offer a sufficient amount of free messages a month for most users, e-mail requires an additional GPRS data plan

Maybe it's just Austin, TX, but most of the plans around here have no free SMS messages.

MMVC, (my mileage varies considerably)
-l

Re:SMS vs email

[nine-times]

It's not that SMS is bad. SMS is basically fine, but it's limited and expensive. That's right, contrary to your point about them being cheaper (than full cellular data plans), SMS messages are expensive for consumers. Last I checked, it cost something like $0.10/message, or something like $20 for an unlimited texting plans. Unlimited data plans aren't necessarily much more than that. And for what? As you point out, they're already built-in with the phones and the cell networks and have very little overhead.

Re:SMS vs email

[DaveV1.0]

This is kind of dumbed down for space and a few other reasons, but....

Cell towers cost a lot of money, both to establish and to maintain. From land lease to electricity to connectivity, the towers require money.

And, a cell tower can only handle so many simultaneous users. The greater the population density, the more towers are needed to serve the population. Add to that the fact that users demand as much coverage as possible, even in remote areas, and you end up with some towers existing only to provide coverage to passing travelers, such as on long stretches of highway. Money must still be spent to maintain those towers even if there are few people using them.

There is a huge difference in the infrastructure required to send a text message and the infrastructure required to send an email. The infrastructure cost of cellular services is much higher, over a lower bandwidth channel, and amortized over a smaller number of customers per unit.

By the way, the data channel used to send email from a cell phone is robbed from the voice channels, so more people sending email means fewer channels available for voice calls.

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

- SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead

I've gotten texts hours after they were sent (especially on New Year's). This delay sometimes occurs even on regular days.

E-mail has had instantaneous delivery for over fifteen years for most people.

With modern network SMS and e-mail are delivered in very short order. The only time e-mail would really be slower would be if you're using UUCP batch processing.

I think some of the other points will become less important once there's more mobile Internet, but SMS will not completely disappear. Perhaps phones' message client will automatically determine which protocol to use? If >160 SMTP, else SMS.

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

In this post I'm going to pull some numbers form my ass. They seem reasonable enough to me, so I won't bother to provide any sources.

> Easy, SMS uses up signalling bandwidth on the cell tower, which is a relatively scarce resource, and when the signalling bandwidth is congested, no calls can take place, thus the company looses money/customers.

But wouldn't a single phonecall use a thousand+ times more bandwidth than a single sms? An sms can be buffered for a short (a few minutes) time without negative consequences. I think it's safe to say that a single sms should cost about 1/100th (or less) compared to a one-minute call if we base our price on signalling bandwith cost, but they tend to be way more expensive than that. So your post does not sufficiently explain the difference.

Re:SMS vs email

[Tetsujin]

Differences:

- SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings

- SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead

I'm sorry, I've got to stop right there.

I have had SMS messages take hours to get to me. Usually when this has happened I've just called the person I was waiting to hear from, spoken to them directly - so clearly the phone network knew where my phone was.

SMS is a nice utilization of technology, but it's become grossly overpriced.

Re:SMS vs email

[Just Some Guy]

SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings

Translation: phone providers suck for not broadly offering decent services.

SMS is faster: because there is no GPRS/TCP/IP/SMTP/IMAP/POP connection and transfer overhead

And a Prius is faster than a Ferrari because it doesn't have those big, heavy brakes.

SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs

Translation: it's not a bug, it's a feature!

SMS is cheaper

ROTFLMAOWTFBBQ!1!

Assuming you're serious, data plans here start at $30/month for browsing + messaging + whatever else you can send over a socket. Unlimited texting is $20, or you can pay $0.25 as you go. Send 3 text messages a day and it's cheaper just to buy the best plan.

Re:SMS vs email

[Endo13]

I use Verizon, as do almost all my friends and family. For $5/month you get 250 messages. Up until very recently their unlimited SMS plan was $15/month, but they've finally lowered it to $10/month.

Re:SMS vs email

[ilo.v]

For me (U.S. iPhone on AT&T) there is one other advantage: battery life. Push email from either my work Exchange account of my personal MobileMe account kills the battery life. Turning push off, and directing important email to SMS (via email to SMS) gives me "push email" features with a good battery life.

Re:SMS vs email

[Rob Kaper]

Like I said, your mileage may vary. In the UK ten pounds top-up on a pre-paid gets you ten pounds of calling credit plus 1000 free text messages.

Fair enough, I don't get free text messages with my plan here in the Netherlands (5c per text message), while my unlimited Internet plan is only 10 euro a month extra. As I use mobile Internet quite a lot it's cheaper for me this way, but I'm sure I could get a provider with a far cheaper texting plan if I wasn't using mobile Internet.

Re:SMS vs email

[an unsound mind]

I opened a new account with a recycled number.

I got plenty of spam during the month, because of the previous owner of the number.

SMS is not cheaper for me either - I use the Gmail application on my cell, the unlimited data plan is $10 and I use it for mostly tethering anyway. I have no free messages.

All I miss from email killing SMS forever is others with the capability and a notifier on my mobile whenever an email arrives.

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, the data channel used to send email from a cell phone is robbed from the voice channels, so more people sending email means fewer channels available for voice calls.

Do you know many people who can type (one a cellphone, no less) at 13 kilobits per second? Because that's the amount of data generated (in one direction) by the GSM codec during speech. While voice timeslots may be used, they won't be for very long.

Re:SMS vs email

[dotgain]

wouldnt the sender of spam have an unlimited texting account or use some email-to-text service?

Or even be the cell carrier themselves...? *cough*vodafone.co.nz*cough*

Re:SMS vs email

[dotgain]

Gulp. Botched link. I even used preview, and I'm into my third cup of coffee. No excuses.

Re:SMS vs email

[dotgain]

I once got a text from a friend telling me where to pick him up mid-city to drop him off at the airport. Thing is, at the time he was already in my car, and we were halfway to the airport. This is Auckland, New Zealand, so that's a fucking long time.

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

SMS is available: it's built-in, e-mail is not present on every phone and relies on a third-party service provider plus settings

Every cell provider has an email address for every phone number, even if they have no data plan. Your email address is "yourphonenumber"@"yourprovidername".com

SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs

SMS already uses attachments for sending pictures & audio.

SMS is cheaper: most plans offer a sufficient amount of free messages a month for most users, e-mail requires an additional GPRS data plan

As per my first point, as long as you don't care about getting truncated to the SMS you can fully send/receive via email. As per my second, as long as the attachment is within size limit you can also attach pictures and audio. Couple that with some creative local software & you could actually send any data file type (the phone just doesn't know how to deal with others but that's a software issue not a transport issue).

The question was why the cell companies don't just integrate email fully. They could do so easily without even requiring a data plan- it's already implemented the functionality just isn't there in the phone software.
This is because they could provide it for next to nothing, but they can gouge you for SMS costs.

Personally, I pay $10 for unlimited text/picture messaging. There's no reason they can't just offer full integrated email for a few bucks a month... except they can fleece people with SMS charges.

Re:SMS vs email

[Urkki]

SMS is clean: no risk of having to retrieve large attachements, hardly any spam due to sender costs

wouldnt the sender of spam have an unlimited texting account or use some email-to-text service?

Yes. And then the spammer would get taken down, or the email-to-text service will no longer be accepted by the operators after enough of their customers complain about spam. It's not just the cost, it's also the traceability. And it works, there's hardly any SMS spam.

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the Netherlands, a small patch of marsh land to the west of Germany.

Pre-paid plans seem to run 8 to 25 cents per message sent, without roaming.

Subscriptions can be cheaper, if you include the messages in your subscription. Maybe 4 or 5 cents a message. Go over that, and you're back at 25 cents a message.

And if you leave the country...

Receiving, at least, is free/included.

Re:SMS vs email

[Anonymous Coward]

1) I don't know anyone with a phone that doesn't have a mail client built in.

2) Protocols are still in place and TCP/IP is still within the providers networks, SMS is very similar to email systems and can take just as long to be sent. There is also no guarantee it will reach its destination.

3) Its basic and that's why they created MMS but spammers are not being charged to send SMS, they send them like email via SMS gateways. YOU are charged by your provider for sending a SMS via their gateway... after that its out in the open just like email. Providers are charged in no way for sending or receiving messages to themselves or other providers.

4) GPRS is not the only way to get internet access. some phones have WiFi which is almost free, HSDPA, 3G, etc.

Re:SMS vs email

[slimjim8094]

You're full of shit.

The text message uses data that's otherwise just random padding data. So that length of data *has* to be sent, it's just otherwise not filled with anything useful (0s, probably).

Once the tower gets the data that it *has* to receive anyways, then it needs to get it to the world outside the cell. Wow, that's a bottleneck, right? Well text messages have no timeframe on delivery so they can take however the hell long they want... such as when the link is otherwise free.

Text messages don't 'use' anything except idle, wasted space. If more people understood that, nobody would tolerate 20c a message.

Re:SMS vs email

[warlock]

Thank you for letting me know I'm full of shit. Honestly I wasn't aware of that possibility.

Anyway, I'm talking about GSM, since that's all I know/care about, being Europe-based. On GSM, SMS fits 140 data bytes (160 7-bit characters) into a USSD packet atop a version of the SS7 protocol over the mobile network.

Messages originating from a cell phone are sent with the MAP mo-ForwardSM operation, a message that would NOT be sent if there was no SMS to deliver, so it is using signaling capacity and as such it can actually pre-empt calls on a standard GSM network (i.e., if there is too much SMS traffic in one location, calls will take longer to complete, decreasing revenue) and is generally a major capacity headache for operators.

Obviously the bandwidth between the serving msc and the sms gateway is not an issue...

One way around this is to send SMS over IP using SIGTRAN and an appropriate adaptation layer instead of the standard TDM based signalling, but I'm not aware of anyone actually doing this.

Meru meru, meru meru

[Anonymous Coward]

Piruriparopirurora

Re:Meru meru, meru meru

[M8e]

Pipiru piru piru pi piru pi
Pipiru piru piru pi piru pi
The bat that can do anyting, excalibolg!

Re:Meru meru, meru meru

[Kushieda Minorin]

Seeing this reference on Slashdot has left me in despair.

Re:Meru meru, meru meru

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in despair! The Internet has left me in despair!

Standards that won't go away

[sohp]

Hmm, reminds me of the joke about why the standard railway gauge is 4'8.5" -- going back to the width of ancient roman roads. There's also the (urban legend?) that legal size paper (In the US) is 8.5"x14" because that's the largest sheet that could fit into a pony express bag without folding.

Re:Standards that won't go away

[Locke2005]

My favorite is the reason why ATM data is broken up into 48 byte cells. It seems that at the standards meeting, there was one group adamant about 64 byte cells, while another wanted 32 byte cells. After much arguing and not being able to reach agreement, they finally decided to compromise -- on 48 bytes! (Of course, like many standards that were designed to be implemented in hardware (e.g. ISDN), ATM is horribly inefficient if you try to do it in software, so the fact that the size isn't a power of 2 doesn't really matter.)

Re:Standards that won't go away

[xaxa]

The ruts in Roman roads are 4'whatever wide because that's how wide the cart wheels were spaced.

Cart wheels were spaced that wide because that's what fits around two horses.

The first railways used horses to pull the loads.

The width of a horse hasn't changed since Roman times, so the width is the same.

Re:Standards that won't go away

[julesh]

joke about why the standard railway gauge is 4'8.5" -- going back to the width of ancient roman roads.

Joke? This is actually true. Both standard gauge railway and roman roads were designed to be the width of a pair of horses.

Re:Standards that won't go away

[smoker2]

But in the end the decision was arbitrary. There were 3 gauges in England (where the railway was invented) and a committee decided on the standard gauge.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RAgauge.htm
http://www.greatwestern.org.uk/m_in_gwr.htm
http://www.narrow-gauge.co.uk/

Re:Standards that won't go away

[timster]

Can't we take this back a bit further? Surely horses were bred to fit under a person.

Re:Standards that won't go away

[Plug]

Which directly relates to the space shuttle.

Re:Standards that won't go away

[againjj]

Snopes. It also mentioned the space shuttle that another responder mentioned.

No need for more

[XPeter]

bc whn u txt u typ lik ths so ther isnt any ned fr mor thn 160 chars. I'm a teen, I know best.

Re:No need for more

[KillerBob]

That's why I turn T9 predictive text on when I use SMS. People I send messages to get nice, clear, concise English, and people who don't have the courtesy to try to spell things properly to me get ignored.

Re:No need for more

[BrokenHalo]

bc whn u txt u typ lik ths so ther isnt any ned fr mor thn 160 chars. I'm a teen, I know best.

OK. When I was a teenager, I knew everything too. All teens do, it comes with the territory.

When you grow up, you might realise that it takes an unconscionably long time to parse that kind of gobbledegook. You have predictive text on most phones. If you use it intelligently (or ignore it if you have quick fingers), you can write your message in English and still get your idea across in 160 characters.

Re:No need for more

[an unsound mind]

However, only in English.

You try something like predictive text in Finnish and you end up with something retarded.

Re:No need for more

[Vegeta99]

I'm no teen, but the grandparent is right. When you learned to write, it was in a handwritten or typewritten letter, right? Did your grammar book have a section on proper text messaging?

No, it didn't, and mine didn't in 1991, either. So neither you or I get to define the rules on proper texting etiquette. For those who spent their formative years with a tiny little multi-tap keyboard, processing a message like that takes no longer than processing the fully typed message.

biocompression

[micromuncher]

My 17 yr old (mostly stupid) step-daughter is already using what looks like huffman coding in her text messages... why doesn't some genius study that.

Re:biocompression

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so going to get into trouble having that attitude.

Re:biocompression

[maxume]

wut?

Re:biocompression

[coolsnowmen]

A Huffman code would waste space if the maximum message size is this small (because you need to transmit the code also). Unless the coding is known ahead of time, in which case I doubt your s.daughter's code would be useful to the non-17y.o-girl segment of the population.

Re:biocompression

[Anonymous Coward]

You should definitely hit that in a year or so.

Re:biocompression

[Anonymous Coward]

How nice, and I bet she thinks highly of her step-father.

Re:biocompression

[Anonymous Coward]

My 17 yr old (mostly stupid) step-daughter is already using what looks like huffman coding in her text messages... why doesn't some genius study that.

you know, calling your step-daughter stupid in a news website is quite stupid. Just for you to know. Hope your wife is not cheating on you with some geek, otherwise you're fried.

Re:biocompression

[4D6963]

No what he means (I think) is that the more frequently occurring words (overall) take the fewer characters, hence acting as a sort of Huffman coding. Which is what people actually do when they frequently use tightly packed txt codes.

Re:biocompression

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder why she has bad self esteem with a shithead step father like you!

Re:biocompression

[coolsnowmen]

Ok, but that isn't Huffman coding; just abbreviation.

Re:biocompression

[4D6963]

Yes, but the point is, just like Huffman coding will give smaller codes to the more frequent symbols, in the case of text messaging the more frequent and common words or even expressions will get the shortest abbreviations. Entire expressions such as "I've got to go" or "I'll talk to you later" become g2g and ttyl for example. If "ttyl" was much less common it'd probably be written "tlk 2 u latr", but it gets its very own 4 letter abbreviation because it's so common. Whereas if you want to say something much less common, chances are there are no commonly recognised abbreviations for it, so you have to spell more of it out.

Re:biocompression

[coolsnowmen]

I understand what you wrote, but I simply don't agree with the metaphor. Huffman codes are not abreviations, they are replacement of the most common symbols with smaller ones, with the trade off that now less common things will take more symbols to transmit.

That would be akin to exchanging "talk to you later" with "z" and "got to go" with "x", now when some one wants to text "zebra" they have to you the longer code "zzebra" less it get interpreted "talk to you laterebra"

Re:biocompression

[4D6963]

Yeah well, this is an analogy, not a strict Huffman coding. That's because we're intelligent people and not rigid algorithms. The analogy is still valid though.

Bad article

[Sockatume]

The article states outright that the 160-character limit came before Hillebrand's "typewriter experiment", and that the experiment actually about because of an argument between Hillebrand and a coworker about whether 160 characters was sufficient for a sensible message. This meshes with what we already know about SMS, namely that it could never have been much more than 128 characters for technical reasons. Quite why the article structures its opening to suggest that Hillebrand pulled the number out of his arse after some typewriter time is a mystery.

Re:Bad article

[Critical Facilities]

Pfft! I don't know what the issue is. 160 characters is more than enough to get the point across. Take for instance Hillebrand's previous research which clea

Getting 160 chars in 128 bits.

[pavon]

For those that were wondering how they got 160 characters into 128 bytes (6.4 bits/char), they didn't. The increased the length of the frame to 140 bytes, which is is 160 characters using a 7 bits/char. Curiosity forced me to look this up, expecting to find some snazzy compacting algorithm for a non power-of-two alphabet.

Re:Getting 160 chars in 128 bits.

[evanbd]

There are some straightforward compaction algorithms for non power-of-two sizes. The simplest approach is to take n symbols in your alphabet, treat it as an n-digit number base b (the number of different symbols), and convert that to base two. You'll use at most ceiling(n * log2(b)) bits.

You can be more sophisticated by using a compression algorithm of some sort (Huffman with a standardized dictionary, for a simple example). Anything that does better than the above n * log2(b) will produce a variable length output, though, which means that while you could usually fit more than 160 characters into 140 bytes, sometimes the limit would be lower (since rare characters take more bits to encode).

Re:Getting 160 chars in 128 bits.

[ChrisMaple]

Using only printing ASCII characters yields log2(96) = 6.6 bits/char.

text messages longer than160 characters

[viralMeme]

How about tokenizing commonly used words and sending that, ne byte per word ?

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[Locke2005]

Surely u r jk?
At appears commonly used words have already been tokenized by the users.
kthx

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[tirerim]

Because you only get 256 different words that way? There are a lot more commonly used words than that, and then you're left with no way to spell out the uncommonly used words, either. You could use two bytes per word... but that's basically what txtspk is anyway, only with variable compression, such that the most common words get compressed down to a single byte (often as part of a longer abbreviation).

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[julesh]

How about tokenizing commonly used words and sending that, ne byte per word ?

Won't work because there are too many commonly used words in most natural languages. You'd be better off coming up with some system for compressing common consonant/vowel combinations into a single character, but even then you'd probably not do an awful lot better on average than the 6 bits per character that SMS works with.

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[Anonymous Coward]

How about tokenizing commonly used words...

It's called "text speak"

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[amicusNYCL]

Because we're taking about a 128-character character set here, where are you planning on storing your tokens, and what characters are you going to remove from the character set? Is it worth it to have the word "and" take up 1 character if you lose a punctuation mark?

Obviously, it would also not be backward compatible with older phones.

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[Anonymous Coward]

lol

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[Anonymous Coward]

How about taking into consideration that not everyone texts in English?

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, there's no:

lol, omg, or wtf in that list.

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[blueg3]

There are roughly 2^18-20^20 words in English. You'd still need the ability to write out words per character for proper names, neologisms, etc., but 18-20 bits is less than three 7-bit bytes. Considering a per-word representation allows you to drop the spaces between words (as they're implicit), only one-letter words could be encoded in fewer bits.

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[Sockatume]

I think that 256 words should be enough for everyone. It's not like ???INEXPRESSABLE CONCEPT ERROR????

Re:text messages longer than160 characters

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, token number 0x0000 would be "LOL"
Token 0x0001 would be "LMAO"
Token 0x0002 would be "OMG"
Token 0x0003 would be "LMFAO"

Maybe the UK can tax these

[davidwr]

Imagine how much they could make if they taxed telephone services.

Oh wait....

Re:Maybe the UK can tax these

[bazim2]

You jest but the UK used to have a mobile tax - at least for business accounts. It was introduced in 1991 by the then Conservative Chancellor of the exchequer Norman Lamont. This tax was repealed in 1999 by then Labour Chancellor (and now of course prime minister) Gordon Brown. One of his better decisions to cut taxes on an enabling technology.

BINGO!

[wonkavader]

And a full-screen terminal (3270, etc.) is really just 25 punch cards. You press "Enter" and they get submitted. Your batch processes and the system returns you 25 punch cards which your smart 3270 punch card reader/editor displays for you.

Punch cards are based on the civil-war-era dollar bill because there were already machine to count and stack dollar bills.

Punch cards were IBM's most profitable product ever until the introduction of the IBM PC.

Re:BINGO!

[OlRickDawson]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card Punch cards predate the computer, because they were used in loom machines to generate paterns. The punch cards were later used for statistical purposes. IBM was already selling statistical machines that used the punch cards before the computer. The reason that IBM was able to grab the market instead of Univac, is because IBM's computers was compatible with the punch cards that the corporations already had.

Re:BINGO!

[jellomizer]

I wonder what type of DRM you can put on a punch card

Re:BINGO!

[jcr]

I wonder why nobody's got a 3270 emulator on the iPhone yet.

-jcr

Re:BINGO!

[smitty97]

I wonder why nobody's got a 3270 emulator on the iPhone yet.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=290608522&mt=8

there's an app for that

Re:BINGO!

[plover]

I wonder what type of DRM you can put on a punch card

You could print shadowed boxes that look like punched holes, that way if someone puts them on a photocopier or in a fax machine it'll look like the holes are there, but a real reader wouldn't see them.

You could put transparent tape over a few of the holes. The common cheap, at-home card readers which read cards optically to save a few bucks will not notice the transparent window. But the Big Iron IBM punch card readers that use real steel fingers to read the holes will simply ignore the taped-over holes.

Along the same vein, you could put red colored tape over the holes, and build the Genuine IBM readers with blue laser readers instead of red. They'll be transparent to the at-home punch-card copy machines that use cheap red lasers, but opaque to the blue frequencies.

Or you could punch some extra or oversized holes in some non-standard locations, like the old half-tracks on the floppy disks. Only official IBM punch machines would be able to accurately copy them.

I got it! Embed a smart chip in the corner of each JCL card, with some cryptographic verification or signature algorithm. As each punch card travels through the system, electrical contacts would verify the authenticity of the card. 4096-bit RSA on the chip ought to do the trick nicely.

Re:BINGO!

[SnarfQuest]

I wonder why nobody's got a 3270 emulator on the iPhone yet.

-jcr

Because the cable that connects the screen to the keyboard weighs about 10 lb more than the rest of the components.

Re:BINGO!

[Anonymous Coward]

And a full-screen terminal (3270, etc.) is really just 25 punch cards.

I don't see how you got that.

A 3270 was a 24x80 screen (so, 24 punch cards) that talked SNA to the mainframe (add in SNA overhead). Each display character took two octets (double your data count to a minimum of 48 punch cards worth): an attribute byte, and a data byte.

In sending data to the mainframe, the 3270 would only send data that had changed from the previous mainframe-to-3270 write; it sent a delta of the data, not the entire screen contents (so reduce the count drastically).

In other words, a 3270 was not "really just 25 punch cards".

Re:BINGO!

[timster]

Same as ever -- put the card in a cheap plastic sleeve, then make the user promise not to open it.

Re:BINGO!

[Hognoxious]

I got it! Embed a smart chip in the corner of each JCL card

But don't include any kind of sequence number in it. If some poor soul drops the deck on the floor, tough luck!

Re:BINGO!

[earlymon]

The parent is mostly correct regarding the Civil War and the wikipedia entry is lacking. I can't speak for the parent, but I am aware of this from a portion of James Burke's Day the Universe Changed series.

The punch card reading technology came from looms, sure - unless you count music boxes. Looms used continuous punched paper first - the music box again.

The punch card was used in 1880 US Census - that statistical application that you talk about - not so much because of the machinery to handle it - it was because of its size, and that was by design.

There were a glut of older cash drawers that could used for keeping the stacks neat and/or in sorted piles.

So, you've got the computing machinery and techniques in place - do you use a strip or a card? When using a card, do you contract to build new carrying boxes or do you re-purpose the vastly available and nearly-useless-therefore-cheap surplus cash drawers? Note the supporting statement from your own wiki reference:

The Columbia site says Hollerith took advantage of available boxes designed to transport paper currency.

I not sure about your analysis of why IBM grabbed the market over Univac. I do recall that in the old days, there was IBM and then there was BUNCH - Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell.

I think if you look back to 1929 and thereafter (read: the rebuilding of American business after the Great Crash), IBM was the key producer of cards and card-related technologies. So the real reason that IBM computers were compatible with the cards that corporations had was more likely that they were IBM cards in the first place.

IBM's history stretches continuously back to the 19th century, and its name means International Business Machines. Univac came from Remington Rand in 1950 - a large industrialist that made, among other things, typewriters, as I recall. So from the Great Crash to 1950, you have nothing from Univac to buy - but you do have IBM. Now computers come along, and the one company that survived the crash and is helping your business get Really Organized is selling you a new type of Business Machine - supply compatible with some of their old. Or - you could buy a Univac.

I could be wrong - I don't think I am, though, for what that's worth.

Re:BINGO!

[jcr]

Egad.. I should have searched for it before I posted, but that really surprises me. I wonder how many copies they've sold.

-jcr

Re:BINGO!

[OlRickDawson]

I read the IBM reason in a computer history book, but I can't remember the name. The reasoning was as follows: Univac was the first company to sell computers commercially. All of their storage was on magnetic tape. IBM came out second, and built an interface to their existing punch card equipment. So, the question for businesses was, buy a univac computer and enter all of the information by hand, or buy an IBM and use the existing equipment.

Re:BINGO!

[earlymon]

OK, cool, I can see that. At the same time, I honestly wonder if it worked that well or if it was just part of IBM's sale's pitch.

In any case, I think it's pretty safe to say and bet that any of the BUNCH machines were better than the IBM - technically. But just like the Windows user's adherence to that OS because he has less change to cope with (insofar as his belief system supports) - if you did change, you were happier.

Can't fight marketing. You don't have to have the #1 product. Having the #2 product with a better rap and better positioning is often the way companies win.

Cheers!

Re:BINGO!

[RiotingPacifist]

but why was a civil-war-era dollar bill 189 Ã-- 79 mm ???

Re:BINGO!

[plover]

Hey, good idea! A detected violation of the DRM could cause the card deck to be routed to the sorter with a random-shuffle algorithm applied.

Re:BINGO!

[earlymon]

See, ya went all metric on us - we'd have thought of it as 7-3/8 inches by 3-1/4 inches.

But, I'll answer anyway. It's because way back then, many people in the Treasury Dept. collectively decided that 8-1/2 x 11 was way too big.

Anytime!

Re:BINGO!

[Hognoxious]

If the deck contained a perl program it would probably still run.

Nothing new under the sun

[Locke2005]

Initially, Hillebrand's team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn't seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

So basically they re-invented Radix-50??? Brilliant! I wonder if they got a patent on this?

Obligatory - ought to be enough

[fprintf]

Obligatory - 160 characters ought to be enough for anybody!

It seems like engineers are always making assessments about what might be the possible usage of a technology, which then creates design considerations/limitations that affect decisions far into the future. If only we had a crystal ball and could see how a technology might be preferred 2 - 10 years from now!

Re:Obligatory - ought to be enough

[Locke2005]

If there is a per-message fee for text messages but regular IP over 3G doesn't have any per-byte costs, my prediction would be that text messages wouldn't be used at all 2 to 10 years from now.

Re:Obligatory - ought to be enough

[PPH]

If only we had a crystal ball and could see how a technology might be preferred 2 - 10 years from now!

Had Twitter been anticipated at the conception of mobile communications, cell phones would have been designed with dials.

In other words

[EmagGeek]

Find a way to charge people a nickel to do something that we can provide them at no additional cost to us.

I love capitalism :)

Re:In other words

[MrMista_B]

Are people willing to freely pay that nickel? Do they choose to pay that nickel of their own free will?

Yes.

So why the snark?

Re:In other words

[Tetsujin]

Are people willing to freely pay that nickel? Do they choose to pay that nickel of their own free will?

Yes.

So why the snark?

Well, with Verizon, for instance, you don't have the option of turning SMS off, and you do pay for incoming messages. So people are free to send you all the text they like, and you wind up paying for it. That's my main complaint.

Re:In other words

[EmagGeek]

What makes you think that was a snark? :)

I love capitalism. I think that this is the model of efficiency - taking something non-value-added and finding away to turn it into a product you can charge for. It's great!

Re:In other words

[hawaiian717]

You can call Verizon and ask them to block SMS on your phone. My brother's done it.

Re:In other words

[Tetsujin]

You can call Verizon and ask them to block SMS on your phone. My brother's done it.

Huh... Well, that's good to know. The people who sold me the service plan didn't seem to think it could be done. :)

Japan is a LOT smaller than the USA...

[DomNF15]

and it costs a lot less to upgrade their entire cell network, even if they are using vastly more expensive technology.
In fact, Japan land area: 377,835 square km

USA land area: 7,689,027 square km - you can fit quite a few Japans inside the USA.
This is the prime reason why US cell networks are so slow to get the latest and greatest...

Re:Japan is a LOT smaller than the USA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so Japan has about 1/20th of the land area of the us. It also has about 2/5th of the population. So, that leaves the US with about 8 times the problem of covering the area (because cost is going to be relative to population). Except, of course, that cell phone coverage isn't so cut and dried a problem. Terrain in Japan is mostly mountainous, which is pretty difficult to cover. The US has plenty of mountains, but is definitely overall much flatter. Florida, for example.
I'd say the problem of covering the US is 3, maybe 4 times as hard as covering Japan, not the 20 times you're implying. Then you have to look at how much US customers are paying versus Japanese customers and what percentage of that is actually amortized costs of equipment and installation.

Re:Japan is a LOT smaller than the USA...

[Shin-LaC]

Who says you have to have the same network all over the country? They could start by adding reasonably-priced data plans covering the major cities and surrounding areas, and work from there.

Re:Japan is a LOT smaller than the USA...

[DomNF15]

And I, a city dweller, when venturing outside the metro area, will be happy when my high speed data services, for which I have paid a premium, no longer work? It's tough to justify paying for a service that doesn't work in the majority of land area, because let's face it, most of the US is suburban/rural, not cities.
You are correct however, that is how Cingular/ATT rolled out 3G service, first to cities, then surrounding regions. But it took much longer to get everyone 3G service than it did in Japan, and it will always take longer for the US to have complete coverage of a certain technology for this reason.

Whoah!

[Bobb Sledd]

Whoah, whoah, whoah.... Since when can we send messages using the rotary dials on our phones?!? I think that kind of thing has the potential to make it big!

160 Characters? that's a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

In my language(Hebrew) we can use only 70 per message.

enough to fit on the screen

[Maarek Stele]

And I always thought it was about what would fit on the screen. Also, since it's only 160 bytes, the phone companies are making Tons of $$$ off these messages when trillions of bytes don't even slow the system down. (unlike the Simpson's episode this past Sunday).

Wikipedia disagrees

[Peter Simpson]

They claim it's actually 140 octets, and the length is a byproduct of the fact that an idle control channel protocol is being used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_service

Now, I realize Wikipedia isn't always the most reliable source, but I'm going to go with their explanation on this...because I'm too lazy to look up the protocols and figure it out myself.

Re:Wikipedia disagrees

[Sockatume]

I tried to gloss over details that I didn't have to hand. Guess I didn't gloss enough. ;) My point is that there was a good technical reason for why SMS is as long as it is (like you say, it piggybacked on a channel that wasn't really doing anything), and that the discussion over whether this was "enough" came after the fact.

Works For Me...

[blcamp]

...after all, I would like to still have opposable thumbs by the time I reach retirement age.

Why were CD's 650MB/72 Minutes?

[ducomputergeek]

Because that was the amount of space required to fit Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one side of a disc. And the researcher apparently loved that Symphony and hated having to switch to different sides of a tape or record.

It's always interesting to the reasons why. Sometimes there is a purely logical reason, and other times, it's just because.

Re:Why were CD's 650MB/72 Minutes?

[cdrguru]

Except your figures are wrong. Originally, manufactured CDs could hold up to 74 minutes, not 72.

The original CD-ROM specification did hold up to 650MB of data.

Re:Why were CD's 650MB/72 Minutes?

[RKThoadan]

Snopes says undetermined on that one... http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp

Bill Gates said it best

[still cynical]

Because 160 characters should be enough for anybody.

Re:Bill Gates said it best

[tgd]

I'm not sure Gates ever said that.

And we already know he didn't say the thing you were making an offhand mock about.

Re:Bill Gates said it best

[still cynical]

I'm not sure Gates ever said that.

And we already know he didn't say the thing you were making an offhand mock about.

Yes, I know he never said that. But "an old quotation often mistakenly applied to Bill Gates" sort of takes the "offhand mock" out of it, don't you think?

SS7 payload length

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought sms was limited by the size of the SS7 payload length.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_service#Message_size

Then How Come...?

[Nom du Keyboard]

Then how come Slashdot only allows 120 characters in your sig line, including html tags? Enquiring minds yada yada yada.

Re:Then How Come...?

[value_added]

Then how come Slashdot only allows 120 characters in your sig line, including html tags?

To make it easier to filter them out for users who set their preferences to avoid being exposed to what's typically noise?

Is it a cause or an effect?

[jcr]

160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.

Perhaps it's a conditioned response to having only short messages available.

-jcr

does the article include...

[dahwang]

an explanation why cell phone service providers are charging ludicrous fees for text messages of 160 characters?

Re:does the article include...

[justindarc]

The summary explicitly states that "the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed" was the means for transmitting and receiving SMS text messages, which is EXACTLY the reason why charging ANY AMOUNT (per month, per message, etc.) is total B.S.!! The communication channel that the messages are sent over are something that would exist whether or not there were SMS text messages in use today!! It costs the service providers ZERO in terms of quantity and there is no guarantee of quality or that the message will even be received on time so, what it comes down to is, how unbelievably wrong it is for them to charge for the service.

Re:does the article include...

[JSBiff]

"The summary explicitly states that "the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed" was the means for transmitting and receiving SMS text messages,"

You know, back in the days of analog voice with very low data-rate secondary digital channels, this actually did make sense - by making the price high, you could limit demand on the 56k or 96k data channel (it would be entirely possible for thousands of users sending texts all the time to completely flood a low-bandwidth digital channel).

But, seems like in a 2.5G and 3G world where everything is digital, and the available bandwidth is on the order of megabits per second, that the ridiculous fees for texting no longer has a good 'quality-of-service' argument. In fact, having people text more and talk less should *improve* quality of service now that it's *all* digital. Seems like it would, anyhow, since voice takes up a lot more digital bandwidth than text.

Re:does the article include...

[dwye]

> an explanation why cell phone service providers are
> charging ludicrous fees for text messages of 160 characters?

No, but how about:

                      Because people PAY those fees!

?

It doesn't matter if it actually PAID them to send lots of SMS messages (it doesn't, if they saturate the control channels); if people are willing to pay stupid prices for something, then it is immoral not to charge them. As W.C.Fields put it, "Never give a sucker an even break."

If you disagree, try buying a provider and including it for free, without raising the base price, and see if you can take over the market. See if you can even survive.

Loss of a good friend

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bunch of bullshit. Why can't it send multiple packets for longer messages? 160 characters? This lazy fuck cost us the English language with his lack of foresight!

I couldn't even fit this post in a text message!

This is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't SMS be nixed in favor of MMS? There's no character limit on MMS.. Or why can't all SMS message > 160 characters be chained like T-mobile always did on my sidekick? While we're at it, since texting seems like such a problem(especially on a touchscreen phone) why don't we have any good Speech-To-Text interfaces? My phone can do voice commands, it's a logical step right?

To get the answer to these questions:
Text "money" to 55512 only $.50 per text.

Typewriter??

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hillebrand sat at his typewriter"

Who still uses a typewriter? I saw one in a museum downtown.
Personally I would of just used an office program with a word count, maybe use some decent data like actual conversations, or twitter data perhaps for sample correlations.

If this guy handed me in this information telling me he hand counted on a "typed" piece a paper the amount for a mobile cellphone text message characters delimiter I would of fired him on the spot for incompetence.

Silly me.

[hrimhari]

Here I was, in my dumb ignorance caused by blind experience on the field, thinking that the limit was actually caused by the magic 255 number less protocol overhead (result: 140) plus 7-bit encoding compression (result: 160).

In 2009

[Tarlus]

And all these years later in 2009, I still have

Re:In 2009

[Tarlus]

to cut my message in half before I can send them.

Re:In 2009

[TeknoHog]

Am I the only one who read your original post as a complete phrase:

And all these years later in 2009, I still have /* No Comment */

Re:In 2009

[shutdown -p now]

Why not buy a phone that does it for you (and reassembles such cut messages when received)? I don't know if it's widespread in U.S., but pretty much all phones I've seen in Russia in the last few years have this feature, so no-one is bothered much about the 160 char limit (well, except that you still pay for N>1 messages, that is...).

How they got more characters.

[nilbog]

If anyone is interested - the way they got more characters available was by cutting down characters to 7bits instead of the normal 8, thus limiting the possible characters to 128.

1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.

Step-parent of the year.

[jcr]

My 17 yr old (mostly stupid) step-daughter

That remark gives me a far more negative opinion of you than of her.

-jcr

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[UncleTogie]

Actually, I find the honesty refreshing.

The ones I have a low opinion of are the parents that insist "My child is really smart and beautiful! It's the school/teacher/environment to blame for my child's inability to multiply single-digit numbers without a calculator!"

Mayhaps if more parents took a realistic view of their crotch-fruit, we wouldn't have the self-absorbed, narcissistic bozos who feel entitled to do whatever they want.

...and before anyone asks, yes, I *am* a parent.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[EvolutionsPeak]

Well it's easier for the GP since it is some other guys crotch-fruit, not his.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[jcr]

Actually, I find the honesty refreshing.

Actually, excusing bad behavior as "honesty" is something I'm rather tired of. Disparaging his wife's child like that shows me that he's someone lacking in empathy or compassion.

-jcr

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are *you* the real jcr ? The king of bad behavior ? Talking about "honesty" ?

Now, I have seen everything.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[jcr]

Do you have some specific complaint to make about me?

-jcr

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[Aoreias]

How is it bad behavior? His step-daughter will almost certainly read it, and it had some value in context.

Without knowing his step-daughter, it's hard for us to pass judgement on him. Kids don't change much past 17, and sometimes you have to call a lemon a lemon.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your remark and forced sig give me a far more negative opinion of you than of him.

-jcr

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[UncleTogie]

Actually, excusing bad behavior as "honesty" is something I'm rather tired of.

Which makes her less stupid how?

I have friends that're dumb, and are the first to tell you "Ah ain't up on all that-thar book-larnin'..." I don't think any less of them for it, and they're some solid friends. Y'know, the kind you could trust at your back when the going gets nasty. Another fave anecdotal moment:

My dad retired to a rural area. A young couple {friends of the family} was getting married, and dad decided to give 'em a book on managing your budget. However, the young wife, barely 18, refused the gift. Dad asked why, and she explained that her husband, Reed wouldn't use it. Her exact words:

"Y'see, Reed don't read."

-blink-

Note, that wasn't "Reed can't read", or "Reed doesn't read much"... Now, you can call me ill-mannered for saying that Reed is probably not the brightest bulb in the marquee, but I'm telling you, some people are just plain dumb, whether it's politically correct to say so or not. That's the problem with the whole PC movement; you can polish a turd all you want, but it's still a turd. BTW, I'm not moderately hearing-impaired, I'm mostly deaf... and have no problems saying so.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else see that Mythbusters?

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should simply ask his reasons for stating she is stupid, instead of assuming he's just an ass.
Your comments don't exactly grace you in a positive light either.
Bad behaviour comes in many forms my friend.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know it's bad behaviour, though?

I mean... I understand where you're coming from, and I actually agree with your general assessment, but given that you (I assume) do not know anything at all about either the OP or his step-daughter, how do you decide what is actually correct (or more likely to be, at least) and whether he's an asshole or she's stupid?

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[micromuncher]

Actually, all you're showing is that you're opinionated, and without anything but a flippant remark on my part, you feel either qualified or entitled to an opinion. An old dude named Socrates once said "To opine is an ugly thing," because casting judgement without basis is a fraud. Now... if I were to say my IQ > 140 and hers 70, would that make me less empathetic? Or how about as she's diagnosed ADHD/ODD/CD/NPD/DPD with a serious cell addiction, and I've had to confiscate no less than 6 cell phones, do you believe that I've disenfranchised her with her peers? Maybe I should be empathetic while I watch the police taking her down for making death threats against other teens? Or perhaps you're not qualified or entitled to an opinion.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'm pretty sure he can have an opinion about his step-daughter. I am not against hypocrisy but that doesn't mean people who are or show none are illustrating 'bad behavior'.

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[jcr]

Now... if I were to say my IQ > 140 and hers 70, would that make me less empathetic?

No, calling her stupid is what shows me that you're lacking in empathy. How you got that way doesn't really interest me. Whatever her problems are, they're not going to be helped by her stepfather disparaging her as you did.

-jcr

Re:Step-parent of the year.

[micromuncher]

"Lacking empaty" and "disparaging" imples you think I'm slighting her... I'm not. That is your perception, and as I pointed out, it is for the most part baseless.

Really, your responses make me think you don't know the definition of empathy (or stupid), but you'll probably discount that by saying you don't care what I think... and you've already said you don't care about the situation... you cast judgement on me, and you're wrong. And opinionated.

Oblig.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a cellphone, you insensitive clod!

Amusing

[cdrguru]

Except I seem to remember that 160 characters was also the limit for alpha pagers, predating SMS by about 10 years.

Where was this guy in the alpha pager days?

Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING

[blahbooboo]

Mind you, my iPhone has no 160 character limit, I'm sure other smart phones just piece together the rapid recieving of messages in to one while the "dumb" phones display them in 160 character chunks.

I absolutely hate when my iPhone friends text me. I end up getting this stream of text messages that are received backwards and cause a lot of hassle just to understand the message on my cell phone.

It would be nice if the iPhone limited texts to 160 characters for those of us without the jesus phone (or a smart phone that supports it).

Oh wait... that's probably why Jobs did that :)

Re:Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING

[IBBoard]

I've got an old Nokia 3510 and it can handle multi-part text messages. Generally it'll arrive in pieces, one after the other, but it manages to patch it together okay. I can send multi-part messages as well (my "characters remaining" count is in the form of "characters remaining/texts used"). I was able to do it with a 3310 as well, and possibly even the Motorola 3588 that I started with.

Someone sold you a crap phone ;)

More on-topic, I can normally fit a properly written text in 160 characters with punctuation etc. Sometimes I want to say more and flow in to a second, but if it is a couple of characters over one text then it's normally because I used a long word and I can trim things to fit. I'd always assumed it was technology and overheads on some fixed size rather than some guy trying to work out how long sentences were and how much he could cram in there.

Re:Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING

[Shin-LaC]

Posting to undo erroneous mod. Will also undo the other three mods I did on this page. There really ought to be a "cancel mod" button.

Re:Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING

[Anonymous Coward]

My phone -- a generic motorolla clamshell without so much as a camera -- has the same habit of splitting texts up and sending them out of order.

I dont know why it does it, it's hard to notice you're going over 160 chars until you get 'what?' replies 5 minutes later.

This wouldnt be as much of an issue if there was at least sequence or part numbers or something.

Re:Which is why iPhone texts are ANNOYING

[Alioth]

I have to wonder what kind of phone you have, when I had Nokia's cheapest model, it happily strung text messages together with no problems at all. In either direction. This was in 2002, long before the "Jesus phone" or things like it.

Re:MultiQ posts

[TaoPhoenix]

Or this trick:
"1. Do you think we should discuss MS's trashing of ODF?
  2. Do you think OOXML is a viable standard?"

Reply comes back as a single yes or no.

The space shuttle design goes back over 2000 years

[blackest_k]

Some things have an even longer history reasons

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp

I won't ruin it for those that have never heard of it before.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

At 3600 baud, even

[Animats]

In AMPS, the cell phone technology being described, there's a 3600 baud control channel shared between all the phones in a cell. Text messages had to be crammed into that. Voice was analog FM, with the control channel telling the handsets which voice channel to use.

That's why SMS is so data-limited. The data channel was tiny.

I've seen stylus's and "stroke" entry.

[WoTG]

I don't know what's actually more popular, but I have seen two ways for Chinese input into phones. There are probably more, I'm by no means an expert.

1. Handwriting recognition on a touchscreen, like a PDA. This, I saw a few years ago, I imagine it's a higher-end option.

2. Recognition based on strokes. It's like predictive text. There are only so many directions to draw the a stroke that combines to make the glyph. So you just pick them off the phone, I guess there's a standard pattern, like starting from the top left stroke.

Hopefully someone who knows more can provide more detail.

I remember when

[KingPin27]

64K should have been enough for everybody.

slashdot uses punchcard image technology

[peter303]

72 usable chars out of 80-char records.

(At least it seems that way with how poorly all the new slashdot web enhancements bog down.)

Makkonen vs. Hillebrandt

[Rovaani]

Hillebrandt is not the only one claiming to have invented SMS. Another contender is Finnish Matti Makkonen

Much more that 160 char now.

[Av8rjoker]

I'm not sure if this is a recent change, but I use T-Mobile in the US and am able to send text messages up to 1000 characters. I confirmed this a few days ago by texting my wife (also uses T-Mobile). I used all 1000 characters and she received the entire text in one message. I don't remember being able to send such large messages in the past, so perhaps this is somewhat new.

Re:Much more that 160 char now.

[Lecard]

I'm not sure if this is a recent change, but I use T-Mobile in the US and am able to send text messages up to 1000 characters. I confirmed this a few days ago by texting my wife (also uses T-Mobile). I used all 1000 characters and she received the entire text in one message. I don't remember being able to send such large messages in the past, so perhaps this is somewhat new.

AFAIK concatenated SMS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS have been around for a while. It may look like a single long message, but it's really just a series of SMSs (each billed individually, usually) split and concatenated by the cell phones. Just try sending it to one (really) old cell phone and you'll see the magic undone (and several messages)

Ohh Hillebrand is the culprit!

[Anonymous Coward]

So Hillebrand is the one I can thank for this stupid limitation. It's because of him, coupled with the fact that a lot of cell phone manufacturers *STILL* don't make phones smart enough to send multiple SMS messages for a single message that goes over 160 characters, that most of my messages have to be sent as multiple messages. Since my Instinct phone is ALSO too stupid to allow multiple drafts at once, I have to send the first half (or first third, etc) and then quickly type the remaining part(s) of the message(s) so that the recipient doesn't try to reply before she/he knows everything I wanted to say. GRRRR I hate that!

LOL!!! I can't beleive my human-detection word image for this message is "LENGTH". How ironic!!

Here's the problem, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to have a cell phone to get SMS.

Or, to put it another way, you have to prioritize other people's desire to pester you above your own desire to do things on your own schedule.

When I'm willing to take phone calls, there is a phone next to me. When I'm driving, dining, playing with my kids, roofing my house, sleeping, etc. I don't want people to be able to contact me. My schedule is more important to me than other people's convenience.

Cell phones are for saps, really, unless you keep yours turned off when you aren't making calls.

Use Project Management Software

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know who uses email anymore for trying to get actual projects done. Of course email is useful, just as a phone is useful. However, in my organization, questions and answers are categorized & assigned priority via project management software.

loom machines actually WERE the first computers

[circletimessquare]

the first computer programmer was lord byron's daughter, and she had a porn star's name for some reason:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Re:MultiQ posts

[bn-7bc]

Seems logical, when you pose questions that possibly can be ansverd whit yes/no, that is the answer you can expect. Why is this the case?
1: ItÂs easy and quick
2: Youre mail is just one of a long list of mail that needs an answer, and the pperson might not be to iterested in the topics put ansvers something, so you donÂt thing he/she is ignoring you

Mayby you can formulate yore questions differently
Example
1: What are youre views on MSÂs trashing of ODF, or is this something you do not have an opinion about?

2:Please give me youre opinione on the viability of th OOXML standard.

As english is not my first language these questions may be able to shorten. I apresceate any input you mau have, abd pleace pardon the any typos as my spelcheker desided to pack up on me just now (will ne delt with ASAP)

All the best
Bjarne

So, why do they cost so much?

[Anonymous Coward]

$20-$30/month for unlimited texting, or 20 cents a message. I can't see how they justify the costs...especially if you pay for a data plan. So, I've decided that anytime I receive an unsolicited text message, I will call my service provider and challenge the charge. It has to cost more than 20 cents to listen to a customer complain. I figure if we all do it, they'll change their plans and allow you to NOT receive text messages if you don't want them ... and who needs them when you can just e-mail or call the person?

Matti Makkonen gets no mention?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hillebrand may have been chairman of IDEG but the SMS was the brainchild of a Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen who gets no mention here.

Re:MultiQ posts

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Or this trick: "1. Do you think we should discuss MS's trashing of ODF? 2. Do you think OOXML is a viable standard?"

Reply comes back as a single yes or no.

yes

A limitation from the analogue systems

[Bufffer]

This is a limitation from the analogue systems, where the text message was sent along with the voice signal. To maintain compatibility with the old mobile handsets and SMSC (SMS Centers), the size was not modified along the time, even with digital new technologies, like GPRS, EDGE and 3G.

In japan there is no limit

[Nekomusume]

Of course, in Japan, virtually all phones have full email capabilities.

Interesting!

[hensonwi]

This is indeed a pretty interesting way to come up with a 'magic number'! It does usually happen to work out as far as texting goes.. :)

Attention Deficit

[aoheno]

Most people lose their attention after 160 characters.

ISDN & GSM

[Speedy09]

My understanding is that GSM protocols were largely inspired by ISDN protocols. ISDN had (has) the same short messaging capabilities on its 'D' channel which is the out of band signaling channel (2B+D). Most ISDN phones and Mac/PC softphones had messaging feature built-in.

Re:I've seen stylus's and "stroke" entry.

[SL Baur]

I don't know what's actually more popular, but I have seen two ways for Chinese input into phones. There are probably more, I'm by no means an expert.

(I'm more familiar with Japanese input, than Chinese, but the principles are the same).

Stroke recognition is a well-established technology as there is a very precise order in how characters must be written. At least in Japan, those weren't very popular - handwriting is a fast fading art. The easiest method is to type in the word phonetically (romaji in Japanese, pinyin in Chinese) and then do a dictionary lookup to select the word you're trying to write. I found it easier to type in Japanese on a cellphone than in English.

Gnokii..

[phylevn]

But with gnokii you can send more than 160 characters.. https://sourceforge.net/projects/binnizawebsms/

email bad sms good

[Anonymous Coward]

All email goes through the corporate server where it is scanned and archived. SMS does not.
SMS can alert me when the email server is down.
SMS is friendlier to leet shorthand. People think you are wierd if you send an email with leetspeak in it.

real question

[Weezul]

Why haven't we made it illegal to charge more than $0.01 cent to send or more than $0 to receive text messages (well, up to 1,000 messages per month, gotta keep the spammers away). Telephone companies pay $0 for text messages since QoS keeps the channel mostly clear for other uses.

A better idea for something to research

[BitZtream]

Someone should do something useful such as figure out why idiots keep paying to send text messages to each other.

Short of simple messages from equipment and other automated systems that are simply letting you know they have other important information you need, text messages via the cell network are one of if not the worst method of communication employed today. Yet somehow idiots continue to pay outrageous prices to send packets of extremely limited usefulness.

Send less data for more cost than a normal phone call, use back channels that are reserved for more important communication so your message may be delayed for god knows how long with no notification to that fact nor any idea if it was actually delivered.

I'm never ceased to be amazed when I hear someone bitching about cable modem bandwidth charges or price gouging while at the same time happily using a 12 button keypad to send messages that take longer to type out than if you'd just call and say the 8 words you were typing.

You're from the US, right?

[jonaskoelker]

Receiving SMS is free and unlimited.

You're explicitly stating that receiving [telephone thing] is free.

You're from the US, right?

I think it'd be really great to give people an infinite Denial Of Money attack against me through my telephone subscription---no wait, I don't! Are US telephone companies coming to their senses about this?

limits?

[Anonymous Coward]

160 characters should be enough for anyone.
3 mobiles around the world should also be enough...

Nikita Kondraskov

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the time 160 characters are OK, but sometimes one might also want to be more creative and send a love letter, break up with a spoiled girlfriend or send a long list for shopping.

In those certain times you really feel like the telephone company is trying to rip you off, because they charge for every 160 characters without to give a damn about your feelings.

So which person wants a knuckle sandwich?

[Neanderthal Ninny]

I hate the 160 character limit which cuts into the body of my critical alerts I get. I want to give that person/people and the propagators of the 160-character limit a knuckle sandwich so the person/people who created this stand up. I understand if they limit the body of the text with 160 character limit but they include the header in that limit which with most senders takes about half of the 160 character limit and what is left for body is nearly useless IMHO.

160 characters....

[mikerubin]

limits cell phone ascii pron to 'b' cups or smaller

Which I can't figure out is to pay to receive!

[freaker_TuC]

We're in 2009 and still people are paying to receive messages; what's up with that?

At all places in Europe, receiving SMS is free; and sending doesn't cost that much either; making it a vialable tool to send a short notice or reminder.

Also the 160 character limit is non-existant with newer phones, splitting the messages in parts before sending. Some phones allow maximally 5 splits to be sent.

Monopsony

[Morosoph]

When the cellphone companies bid for spectrum, it was on the basis of their projected income. Given free texts, their projected income would have been lower, so they would have bid less. There's no opportunity to "recover the cost", since the amount bid was based upon revenue-maximising charges in any case. Charging more for a call would get the companies less revenue, rather than more.

Result: Call charges wouldn't be much different than they are now.

The bidding process means that the government has ripped off the customer by proxy, and any mandated limitations would have saved the customer at the government's expense. The cellphone companies wouldn't have seen much difference.

Certainly there's an argument in terms of corporate freedom for the government not placing such conditions of licence, but it's not one of customer interest.

Perhaps the better plan would have been to forgo bidding, and allocate spectrum, so that the parties involved would have had breathing space in which to compete.

12 extra chars

[Anonymous Coward]

With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

128*8/160 = 6
2^6 - 2*26 = 12

So they could encode for all letter capital and lowercase and 12 other chars.

6 bit encoding, huh.

160 characters...

[cbraescu1]

160 characters should be enough for everybody!

I don't get it...

[Msutc201]

I always wondered why cell phones had a 160 character limit and still think it's odd. Having Verizon, if I send a text of over 160 to another Verizon user, it allows the message to be sent. However, trying to send a text that exceeds 160 to someone on another network only allows the first 160 to be seen. Is there really that much miscommunication between networks to not allow these texts? At least some other companies allow texts of over 160 to be sent as multiple texts (ie 1/2, 2/2). I think they could change it if they wanted but they rather not, and why do they care? It's not like it costs them anything for our text messages to be sent anyways.