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Verizon Charges New 'Spam' Fee For Texts Sent From Teachers To Students (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A free texting service used by teachers, students, and parents may stop working on the Verizon Wireless network because of a dispute over texting fees that Verizon demanded from the company that operates the service. As a result, teachers that use the service have been expressing their displeasure with Verizon. Remind -- the company that offers the classroom communication service -- criticized Verizon for charging the new fee. Remind said its service's text message notifications will stop working on the Verizon network on January 28 unless Verizon changes course. (Notifications sent via email or via Remind's mobile apps will continue to work.) The controversy cropped up shortly after a Federal Communications Commission decision that allowed U.S. carriers' text-messaging services to remain largely unregulated. Verizon says the fee must be charged to fund spam-blocking services. Remind said in a statement: "To offer our text-messaging service free of charge, Remind has always paid for each text that users receive or send. Now, Verizon is charging Remind an additional fee intended for companies that send spam over its network. Your Remind messages aren't spam, but that hasn't helped resolve the issue with Verizon. The fee will increase our cost of supporting text messaging to at least 11 times our current cost -- forcing us to end free Remind text messaging for the more than 7 million students, parents, and educators who have Verizon Wireless as their carrier."
As a professor at a left-coast US university: holy shit, I would never give students my cell phone number, and I don't want theirs. Students are creepy and will take any opportunity to do all sorts of creepy things. Little future axe-murderers of America will sit through all your office hours or follow you around campus because they have no friends and because you look like the father figure they never had. The university provides me with an e-mail address for sending students reminders about things, and that suffices. I can turn over e-mails to the IT staff if a student starts getting creepy. My cell phone number, however, will never meet my students' cell phone numbers.
Including anti spam measures, all in cost per message that stays within the telco's system was less than 1 x 10 ^-5 cents per message.
All in cost included EVERYTHING: site loading, backbone network, data center, electricity, vendor support, etc.
SMS infrastructure is incredibly cheap. A telco is not giving up much when a plan includes unlimited messaging.
The only thing that inflates cost is when the message goes into another telco's system and a border fee is charged.
Caveat: Did this 10 years ago. I am sure costs have increased (dripping sarcasm).
Remind sends emails to every teacher they can to try to get them to use their "free" service.
Once enough teachers in a district start using it, Remind contacts the school district to inform them that they are breaking the law and the paid version that archives the communications can be bought for tens of thousands of $$ a year.
This company has a business model based on borderline extortion. Hope they go out of business