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Verizon Offers Refunds For Fraudulent SMS Messages
itwbennett writes "Verizon has filed a lawsuit against a group of people and related companies that it alleges duped people into signing up and getting charged for premium short message services. Because some of the short message programs the defendants set up complied with Verizon's rules, Verizon says it is unable to identify which customers didn't know about the charges for the services. As a result it has set up a Web page where customers can file a claim form and get reimbursed if they were wrongly charged for the services."
Does this mean the guy I was talking to isn't an Albanian prince and I'm not get my gold bars?
In Europe you do not get charged in any way for receiving text messages.
You do not pay anything to receive calls either...
You pay to send messages to people and you get charged for calling, but not for receiving.
ow you buy a multi-line plan....say a family plan consisting of 5 lines.
Last I looked, the family plan doesn't require five phones. A family plan was simply shared minutes with two or more phones. The problem is, its actually more expensive until you get five phones on your plan. Verizon's family plan actually makes no sense. Traditionally, shared minutes was a means of cheaper service. But with Verizon, you actually pay a premium for cheaper service until you have reached five lines and then its only slightly discounted.
If you are a Verizon customer and on a family plan and do not have five phones on the account, very, very, very likely you can save money by moving away from the family plan and converting to individual plans without shared minutes.
Texting is so much less data being sent in small packets while voice requires so much more infrastructure
Its even more insulting than that. Text data is actually carried by the control channel which every phone must have to register on the network. All they did was increase the packet size of the control channel messages. That's why there is a text message size limit. The RF portion of transport is really what costs them and their extra cost for carrying SMS is literally, almost zero. On a busy tower, they can fit 9 SMS messages into a single ethernet frame which means. SMS is the most expensive data for consumers and the cheapest for carriers. The fact SMS isn't a completely free service is mind numbing.
But considering I've met many people who send more than 50 texts per day, so they are clearly very good at comunicating with texts.
Nah, they're usually just too ADHD to talk to one person at a time.
SMS is great for avoiding conversation while communicating with others, and that most definitely has its merits. However, I remember that, as a teenager, I often talked to girls using instant messaging because it allowed me to compose myself without saying something stupid. Unfortunately though, the stuff it left out eventually taught me that flirting via IM was a foolish and questionably effective endeavor.
Conversation is as much a game as it is a form of art or a tool for communication. Handicapping yourself by limiting your control over that game, your canvas for the art, or a choice of the inferior or improper tool for the sake of----whatever the hell the reason is----when you could simply talk to someone to communicate more efficiently or more accurately in the majority of situations is just... stupid.
And don't even get me started on how I'm supposed to understand 160 characters of nonsense without *any* punctuation.....
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