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AT&T Kills $10 Texting Plan, Pushes $20 Plan
Hugh Pickens writes "AT&T is scrapping its 1,000-texts-for-ten-bucks plan and replacing it with a plan that offers unlimited texts for $20. Users who don't want the unlimited plan can opt to pay 20 cents per text. Current AT&T subscribers are grandfathered in, so you can stick with whatever plan you selected when you signed your contract. 'The vast majority of our messaging customers prefer unlimited plans and with text messaging growth stronger than ever, that number continues to climb among new customers,' says AT&T. The news has not been received warmly in the tech blogosphere. 'AT&T calls this "streamlining." We call it what it is: an outrageous, gigantic scam,' writes Sam Biddle in Gizmodo. 'AT&T's taken away new customers' option to spend less, whereas carriers like Verizon still offer tiered texting plans for varying budgets.'"
They'll charge whatever the market will bear. Luckily for them, they partially control the market too. Imagine what the market would bear if they acquired Verizon as well...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
and yet the same people don't think twice about buying a $700 phone where apple's profit margins border on ridiculous
This is why I stick with Tracfone... I typically use 150-180 minutes per month, including 20-30 text messages (sending and receiving). I'd love to go with Verizon, as they're the only carrier with coverage in most of NY and would settle for ATT... except NONE of the major carriers offer plans that wouldn't be a huge waste of money to me. Even their pre-paid plans are considerably more expensive than Tracfone (I pay about 7 cents per minute, sending or receiving a text counts as 0.3 minutes).
Since Apple is introducing technology in iOS 5 for an SMS-like service among all iPhones and other iOS devices (and iChat, too, IIRC), AT&T's SMS revenue is about to plummet. And that's one of the easiest ways AT&T has to up the dollars per customer metric. (How many people use tethering? Probably very few.) So AT&T sees this, no doubt, as a way to keep their SMS revenues up. Everyone else will see it as a reason to dump SMS altogether and use an IP-based rather than cell-based messaging service. Now if only Apple and Google could agree on interoperable protocols for stuff like this....
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
shut up and take it.
No, the parent gave you an option - move your business to another carrier. You have at least 2 other choices (Sprint, Verizon Wireless) and in some cases many more (Metro PCS, TracFone, U.S. Cellular, Cricket). What's so hard about switching carriers again?
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
'The vast majority of our messaging customers prefer unlimited plans and with text messaging growth stronger than ever, that number continues to climb among new customers,' says AT&T.
Well, yeah... if their only choices are unlimited or nothing...
Do you think that companies charge you what things cost to make? Do you think that it costs Fiji Water twice as much as Aquafina to bottle H2O? Newsflash: businesses charge on value, derived from what people are willing to pay, not based on what it costs them to produce such items. In cases of price gouging, competitors come into the market and undercut the original producer. In the case of Mobile Wireless, apparently it's a little bit trickier to upend the market, due to the massive capital infusion it would require to build out a national network.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
The marginal cost of texting is next to nothing. Texts get sent over the control channel. Regardless of texting, the control channel is needed for making calls, and it's mostly wasted bandwidth the rest of the time. Text messaging rates are highway robbery. That they cost anything is a product of our lovely cellular service industry.
But don't worry, once AT&T and T-Mobile merge, they won't waste so much money on redundant overhead, so they'll be able to make texting free with the savings. Right? Right?
Jeez ... I'm tired of reading comments from people who have no clue how the system actually works. If you did, you'd realize how AT&T actually loses money per text.
Here's the breakdown ...
You send a text message which transmits the data in digital format (ones and zeros, to the layman). The message is received in a central building where the message is repeated by flashing lightbulbs. One pulse for zero. Two pulses for one. Workers transcribe the texts then pass them off to their editorial department who double checks the transcription. Then it's passed to another department (whom I'm not at liberty say who or what it does*cough*NSA*cough) before it is passed to the encoding department where workers hand encode the messages into paper rolls that are fed into the central dispatch unit to where it is communicated to your phone.
And you complain that it costs twenty bucks a month? .
There's more to it than just that. I had a co-worker who absolutely hated what AT&T has been doing... stomping around furiously. Why didn't he just change? "Friends and Family" plans... that and coupled with the fact that some friends and family don't have other options where some of them live.
It's never quite as simple unless you're a hermit or a selfish/self-centered person.
In any case, my T-Mobile plan beats anything AT&T offers on every detail and strangely, I have not seen any mysterious charges on my bill... ever. Also, I was on T-Mobile with friends and family one of my brothers thought he was being screwed by them somehow and went with AT&T and shortly after got the first iPhone. ("It does everything I could want a phone to do! It's the perfect phone!" he said... heh... he keeps buying iGadget after iGadget too... oh well)
I'll miss T-Mobile... Despite the "smoking gun" which proves AT&T has lied to government and investors, no action will be taken to stop them from buying T-Mobile. As we will see, lawmakers and government will ignore their own laws, policies and procedures to enable this to happen. And every time we hear things about how important law is and how no one is above the law, we will have this (among many other things) in our recent memory to remind us it's just not true.
Lack of carriers makes switching difficult at times. If there is only a couple and all of them are assholes on some level. The title was also "Whining Little Bitches" indicating the GP believes they should not be voicing their opinions. What's so hard about having people express their dislike for a company's actions? Why are people "bitches" for calling out a company's bullshit actions? People have every right, and the obligation, to point out companies acting in bad faith. They do not have to silently take it or hope that they can move on to an alternative.
I have another texting plan called "party line". This is texting group that is open to everyone to join. each text you post costs 1$. the person that posts the very last text (15 second closeout window) get $1000 cash!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Actually, there is. It's one of the reasons why the iPhone on AT&T nearly took out AT&T's network. Yes, the AT&T network was nearly disabled because the control channel was too busy (there were plenty of voice/data channels to go around).
The bandwidth of the control channel is shared by everyone, and because it's a control channel, everything is coordinated through it. Making a call? The phone asks for two voice channels through the control channel. Ditto for incoming calls - the cells set up a pair of channels and announce the call over the control channel. Ditto to set up and tear down data connections (which can re-use voice channels).
Problem was, the iPhone was VERY aggressive. Maybe too aggressive - it would request a data channel, then tear it down the instant it went idle. This caused excess control channel traffic (but was good for battery life - holding idle data connections open costs battery).
Toss in many iPhone users, many text users, and heavy calling and the control channel can get congested way before capacity. And this leads to slow network data (it can take forever to set up a channel), dropped calls (if the control channel is full, it's hard for the radio to perform handoff), and other issues.
Europe and Asia didn't suffer because texting was so common that carriers migrated to variable-bandwidth control channels - the control channel bandwidth could expand with need.
T-mobile suffered a similar issue with an IM app - I guess the interaction between the IM app and Android's network handling starting causing the same problems.
That's the technical side, anyhow. But the practical side - texts, like gas, are products sold at market rates - what the market will pay, which have little to do with the real cost of providing the service. And people have said they'd pay heavily for texting.
Don't forget that text message costs are exclusively determined by lying to you and constant bullshit experiments in "what the market will bear".
Texting is almost completely free for carriers. The messages piggyback to and from your phone in the spare bandwidth of the tower synchronization signals the phone uses to check reception and select towers for voice/data transmission. The only infinitesimal cost that might exist to the carrier is transmitting 140 lousy bytes from one tower to another tower; the capacity on the towers themselves is free.
Now this might have changed somewhat in recent years; I'm not a communications engineer. But I don't think it has. And I'd bet my life that even if it has, texts still don't cost the carriers more than 0.1 cents.
This is the very picture of evil corporate overlords plotting in a dark tower to see how much money they can squeeze out of you for nothing and avoid advancing technology as long as possible. Real technology entrepreneurs like George Eastman struggled constantly against themselves, trying to make things cheaper and better for the consumer. Eastman in particular tried desperately to obsolete his own products in favor of offering consumers even better, years before the prior product would otherwise have dropped in sales; today we call that cannibalism, and most tech companies struggle like hell to avoid a whit of it. (People acted like Apple was batshit crazy for not better managing their product line when iphones started to cannibalize ipods. Nevermind that iphones cost hundreds more, so even that cannibalism is pure profit.)
When's the last time you saw a company that put out everything they had, every time, and didn't hold something back for upgrade cycles or a magical September festival of worship?
Yes, but Virgin doesn't roam onto Verizon's network. There are many places where you won't get service.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
GSM was the initial platform for SMS. In fact, Deutsche Telekom was an early collaborator and help design the spec we have now.
SMS was initially designed to use a control channel in GSM, It has, of course, expanded to be used in AMPS (now dead), CDMA, and TDMA. This allowed it to use a service not needed for voice calls (and I assume for data nowadays), but imposed some limitations on the amount of data, both in terms of speed and limiting utilization to avoid interfering with necessary functions. The control channel is also used for call setup, among other things.
While this control/signalling channel is built into the GSM specs, it is used for other things, such as set registration and call setup/teardown, so using it 'for free' isn't as simple as ti seems, and it is limited by the protocl that it uses, 160 characters per 'message'. And SMS does require some 'back office' servers and data systems to function, and exchange with other carriers. SMS isn't free, but it is being sold for up to 400 times the profit margin similar data volumes are sold for as what we thing of as 'data' service. Landline telcos did the same thing, charging hugely for in-state toll calls, even to a neighboring town, and discounting nationwide toll calls dramatically. We might see some action some day by the FCC to more appropriately price SMS, unless they buy the argument that the real costs in SMS are handling the messages as they traverse the system. There is some cost and effort in processing >120 Billion SMS a month in the US alone, or 7-87 Trillion SMS worldwide per year.
Other bits of trivia:
SMS is by design a best-effort delivery system. Delivery is not guaranteed. But when was the last time you lost one? I remember when AT&T TDMA service would lose SMS for a few days, and then I would get them all in a flood. I miss my old Nokia 5150, great phone. The Siemens S46, on the other hand...
A5/1 or A5/2 encryption is used, which is weak enough to be trivially broken. There are open-source GMS implementations that let you force an unencrypted connection and own, presumably, all the data, including SMS. If you're into that sort of thing.
The SMS control channel doesn't need much of a signal to function. You can often get an SMS out even if there is no discernable signal being displayed on your phone, and can't even get an emergency call out.
Before GSM developed GPRS, you could use SMS as a 'bearer' or data packet for WAP. I had a phone that did this, and it was no worse than GPRS, which is bad enough. But WAP didn't really take off like this, since you would be locating your WAP server inside the carrier's network, just not feasible. The control channel back then was adequate for very lightweight WAP. There are plenty of places in rural America where you can be stuck with GPRS speeds, usually 8kb/s. I vacation near one. It's fun. iPhone users on AT&T sometimes get a little crazy there.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
When a company is charging 10,000,000 Percent more for something than they evidently need to, I would say that's an indication that the free market, competition, and or consumers are failing miserably, and some type of legislative action is needed to correct it.
"The market will bear it" seems like a pretty shitty justification to allow such excesses to continue. The market is creating monsters here. Excessive profits aren't leading to more jobs, they're leading to buying off the government, which leads to less competition, leading to more excessive profits, a feedback loop. I don't see how this ends well for the rest of us if we don't stop it. "The new Iphone 27! $5999! The difference between it and the Iphone 26 is that the iphone 26, released three months ago, is not going to work when we upgrade our network to 47932G technology!"
So, you've never complained to a company when you were unhappy with their service? And no company has ever changed a policy due to public outcry?
T-Mobile and AT&T run their 3G on different frequencies, so unless your device happens to support both, you'll only get 2G data with your old device when you switch.