Facebook May Bust Up the SMS Profit Cartel

AndyAndyAndyAndy writes "Fortune had an interesting article recently about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans. 'Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.' A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company a Thursday. The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps. The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans."

Comments

Google Voice and TextFree

[Mean Variance]

I've found the available workarounds are sufficient to the point that I could give a crap about texting fees. I use GoogleVoice and TextFree and they work great. My wife uses Virgin Mobile for $25/mo (that's it no extra taxes or garbage) and can text to her delight.

Re:except

[Anonymous Coward]

My cellphone bill says otherwise. Saved $30 a month by switching to google talk for international texting.

Re:Another retread

[blueg3]

So it's Google Voice, but without the other features.

Re:except

[trapnest]

That's not really the case, most of the dumbphone "IM" applications are really sending IMs over SMS.