About $300 million US of it per month. Greedy bastards. If they had some deal for Php300 to 500 per month for unlimited text, they'd still make a fortune. I'd buy in at that price point.
It's copper for the electricity, and microwave for chatting back to the exchange. Unless some convenient copper or fiber based infrastructure already exists nearby, then radio links are nearly always used.
SMS is sent over a 64kbps channel. Reduced in bandwidth and capacity compared to what? Given that it is simple to add more SS7 links, where is the problem?
I spent a bunch of years working in the field, it was a rare site to see SS7 saturating a link. These days it is simple and cheap to add more SS7 capacity. You can already jam a metric crap load of phone calls down the bearer and still have lots of nice white space to spare for data. SS7 isn't much of a bottleneck at all. Certainly it's not the most elegant way to do SMS, but there really isn't that much competition with all the other dialing cruft that goes over the wire.
I guess others might disagree.
If you have the number of customers that would saturate your existing links, then you are also making more than enough money to add in more capacity.
SS7 works well over pretty much any type of link. It's extremely common to see it on satellite, I think that would be about as unreliable as it can get, though you could get creative and try and do it over HF with a couple of home made transceivers and some bent up coat hangers for antenna.
Maybe in the US it is taken as seriously as you say, but elsewhere the telco's really don't care how it happens, just so long as it almost always accurate and still turns them a stupidly high profit. Here in Asia it's quite common to see 8 or more SS7 links on a single E1, that's the popularity of SMS in this part of the world.
It's technically more efficient to do SMS some other way, but right now it would seem bandwidth isn't so scarce that it makes economic sense just yet.
Perhaps the most annoying part is that SMS is just part of the standard payload for the dialing method used (CCITT 7) Normally this sits in a 64kbps time slot on a trunk between the cell tower and what ever is in range, another cell tower or the exchange. These trunks (T1/E1) generally have more than one SS7 running through them. Even in high density areas these things are not that busy.
This transmission has to be present regardless of someone sending a text or not, so the infrastructure is already in place and paid for with normal monthly post-paid bills. As others have said, the size is somewhere around a thousand bits to max out the space allocated for SMS, these transmissions just tick over so there is a huge amount of waste happening.
Ultimately I guess my point is that the whole text phenomena is an absolute gold mine for the telecommunication companies. Maybe not so much in the US, but here in Asia you don't often see anyone talking on their phones, just 'texting' It's cheaper than in the US though, 2 (US) cents per message sent, received is free. MMS costs about 4 cents to send, also free to receive. The telco's are logging around 11 billion messages per month combined, that's a crap load of money right there. ($272 Million US per month spread out between them and the tax man)
Because it's a few orders of magnitude cheaper to jam a 30MHz wide analogue signal down the coax than it is to send the same thing at 10 or 20MHz in digital format. You're looking at perhaps 4 to 5 zeros on your bill for each modem alone, some modification is also needed on all amplifiers and other crud on the lines out to the customers. It's more expensive to set up, though the bandwidth savings mean more channels over the same wire, and ultimately more money in the long run.
The difference being: Once the electricity, maintenance, staff wages, golden parachutes, and a few other little bits and pieces are paid for, that chunk of fiber is pure profit, it doesn't make much difference if it is used right up to capacity or very little. The same cannot be said for resources dug out of the ground.
Nothing personal, you are absolutely one person I would never vote in to any position of power. Your ideas are not even remotely democratic if you have to start out by forcing people to vote. What ever happened to freedom of choice and expression? Of course you don't have to listen to my expression, but neither do I yours.
I'm sure my opinion will be shot to pieces by people saying that I'm part of some greater society, blah blah, police force, fire, ambulance, military, blah blah, public utilities and so on. Anyone doing so would actually be right. Just because I wouldn't follow your idea of democracy doesn't mean I wouldn't or couldn't participate in society.
I'm an expat, my views are not necessarily logical, but they are ok for me. I can't vote in the country where I live, nor do I have to vote while away from the country I left. Double win really.
There are some legit reasons for P2P. Doesn't Kazaa scan your entire hard drive for files to share if you just blindly click through the installation process? Could he not just swing it as a case of negligence?
Garmin Mobile XT will let you do this on its own with as many waypoints as you want to set. It is much easier to create the routes on a PC with a combination of various mapping programs though - I think Mapsource lets you define a bunch of points to route through, like others have said, it is a sequential solution, pretty handy though.
My GPS handles this whole problem for me, I just feed it a few waypoints and it figures out some nifty turn by turn navigation to calculate the shortest distance or fastest travel time depending on traffic congestion, speed traps and limits, and so forth. It does connect to the net to get the latest traffic conditions though, so it's not completely self contained.
Even better, Garmin Mobile XT works on my N95, so no need to rip the car GPS out of the dash when taking a walk.
Insightful? Maybe in opposite land. Perhaps you just missed the memo, it's every person for themselves. I think you need to visit a few of these under-developed nations and take a look at how the other half actually live. What you so outwardly judge as infantile, I see with my own eyes as truly identical, first world, and absolutely no different to any other country on the planet. Corporate greed in America has the same underpinnings the world over. The people at the top want more money and power, they will do whatever it takes to get it. End of story.
I think I prefer to live in one of these countries you appear to despise, I actually have significantly more freedom and a far better standard of living than I could ever have in my country of origin (Australia), and it all comes at a fraction of the price.
Smaller localized footprints are useful in large central business districts where there are many service providers and tall buildings, or inside shopping centers, subways, and other high traffic areas, but errors in this type of positioning could easily be as high as 30 kilometers once you start heading out of the major centers. I'd prefer to know exactly where I am with a real GPS and the luxury of turn by turn navigation, even if I am just out walking.
No, you mean there will be a manufacturer approved method of creating 3rd party applications, it has nothing to do with legality, and everything to do with the corporate bottom line. I'll likely be similar to the current Symbian 3rd edition stuff, pretty much useless for the types of people that are currently doing these modifications.
Part of the problem with this approach is that a growing number of places that provide whois lookups also limit the number of requests that can be made from a single IP per minute/hour/day etc. Flooding is likely to get noticed very quickly, the best shot as others have said would be encryption.
WTF would the vast majority of people living in Australia right NOW need to say sorry for? Sorry for the atrocities a bunch of retards (many long since dead) undertook while the current population was, at best, running around in nappies with no idea about the world around them.
Saying sorry is very probably a bad idea, it's an acknowledgment that will likely be followed by a bunch of arsehat lawsuits from a load of morons that are 6 generations down the line from the actual 'stolen' individual, though they'll still be taken seriously and wind up with a nice little golden parachute at the expense of contemporary society.
Why would sorry need to be said now, almost 40 years after what is arguably the last occurrence? Why was it not said back then? And given that the whole issue is still clouded in huge amounts of controversy, the realities are likely to be a tad different. A lot of these children were abandoned by their own parents anyway, they were cared for by the government, not stolen. This is not to say it never happened, just that people should slow down a touch and open their eyes.
And if you did routinely break encryption, the moment you act on anything you have decrypted is the same moment that you would start to come under much closer scrutiny. Your secret would not stay secret for long.
Nope, it's just plain old copyright infringement. Stealing would require that some physical object be intentionally taken from its owner without permission.
Adding 8 gigabytes to the Nokia N95 didn't increase its initial selling price by much at all. The price has actually fallen quite a good deal over the last couple of months and is now just a small amount above the original N95.
Phones are not designed to be given away for free at all, you just need to read the fine print on your contract a little better. In nearly all cases you end up paying a significant amount more for a contract phone than you would if you had just purchased it outright from the beginning.
The iPhone is not worth much of a second glance here in Asia. It simply wont compete, the reason for this is because it actually does lack a crap load of functionality (despite your opinion to the contrary) that has been bog standard in many phones over here for the last couple of years.
Ahhh, yes, but I'm not in your back yard, so what you feel as unjust or otherwise is of no consequence to me.:-)
While I can't speak for the NSA or US laws, in Australia anyone at all can set up an organisation like the Defence Signals Directorate. It is fully legal to monitor communications of foreign origin and destination. For private individuals the vast majority of domestic transmissions are also legal to intercept. (Some exclusions surrounding radio based telephony exist) The government does have far more restrictions imposed on what they can and can't do than the general population. The DSD is prohibited from monitoring all domestic transmissions - with some exceptions. Perhaps much less widely known is that it is entirely legal for the DSD to receive domestic non-communications type signals such as RADAR. The laws are all open for public viewing. Three letter agencies like the DSD are quite transparent in what they can and cannot do. How they do it is what remains secret.
Slashdot Mirror
About $300 million US of it per month. Greedy bastards. If they had some deal for Php300 to 500 per month for unlimited text, they'd still make a fortune. I'd buy in at that price point.
It's copper for the electricity, and microwave for chatting back to the exchange. Unless some convenient copper or fiber based infrastructure already exists nearby, then radio links are nearly always used.
SMS is sent over a 64kbps channel. Reduced in bandwidth and capacity compared to what? Given that it is simple to add more SS7 links, where is the problem?
I spent a bunch of years working in the field, it was a rare site to see SS7 saturating a link. These days it is simple and cheap to add more SS7 capacity. You can already jam a metric crap load of phone calls down the bearer and still have lots of nice white space to spare for data. SS7 isn't much of a bottleneck at all. Certainly it's not the most elegant way to do SMS, but there really isn't that much competition with all the other dialing cruft that goes over the wire.
I guess others might disagree.
If you have the number of customers that would saturate your existing links, then you are also making more than enough money to add in more capacity.
SS7 works well over pretty much any type of link. It's extremely common to see it on satellite, I think that would be about as unreliable as it can get, though you could get creative and try and do it over HF with a couple of home made transceivers and some bent up coat hangers for antenna.
Maybe in the US it is taken as seriously as you say, but elsewhere the telco's really don't care how it happens, just so long as it almost always accurate and still turns them a stupidly high profit. Here in Asia it's quite common to see 8 or more SS7 links on a single E1, that's the popularity of SMS in this part of the world.
It's technically more efficient to do SMS some other way, but right now it would seem bandwidth isn't so scarce that it makes economic sense just yet.
Perhaps the most annoying part is that SMS is just part of the standard payload for the dialing method used (CCITT 7) Normally this sits in a 64kbps time slot on a trunk between the cell tower and what ever is in range, another cell tower or the exchange. These trunks (T1/E1) generally have more than one SS7 running through them. Even in high density areas these things are not that busy.
This transmission has to be present regardless of someone sending a text or not, so the infrastructure is already in place and paid for with normal monthly post-paid bills. As others have said, the size is somewhere around a thousand bits to max out the space allocated for SMS, these transmissions just tick over so there is a huge amount of waste happening.
Ultimately I guess my point is that the whole text phenomena is an absolute gold mine for the telecommunication companies. Maybe not so much in the US, but here in Asia you don't often see anyone talking on their phones, just 'texting' It's cheaper than in the US though, 2 (US) cents per message sent, received is free. MMS costs about 4 cents to send, also free to receive. The telco's are logging around 11 billion messages per month combined, that's a crap load of money right there. ($272 Million US per month spread out between them and the tax man)
Because it's a few orders of magnitude cheaper to jam a 30MHz wide analogue signal down the coax than it is to send the same thing at 10 or 20MHz in digital format. You're looking at perhaps 4 to 5 zeros on your bill for each modem alone, some modification is also needed on all amplifiers and other crud on the lines out to the customers. It's more expensive to set up, though the bandwidth savings mean more channels over the same wire, and ultimately more money in the long run.
The difference being: Once the electricity, maintenance, staff wages, golden parachutes, and a few other little bits and pieces are paid for, that chunk of fiber is pure profit, it doesn't make much difference if it is used right up to capacity or very little. The same cannot be said for resources dug out of the ground.
Nothing personal, you are absolutely one person I would never vote in to any position of power. Your ideas are not even remotely democratic if you have to start out by forcing people to vote. What ever happened to freedom of choice and expression? Of course you don't have to listen to my expression, but neither do I yours.
I'm sure my opinion will be shot to pieces by people saying that I'm part of some greater society, blah blah, police force, fire, ambulance, military, blah blah, public utilities and so on. Anyone doing so would actually be right. Just because I wouldn't follow your idea of democracy doesn't mean I wouldn't or couldn't participate in society.
I'm an expat, my views are not necessarily logical, but they are ok for me. I can't vote in the country where I live, nor do I have to vote while away from the country I left. Double win really.
You could just stick your kid(s) in the trolley with a few indestructible toys and encourage them to pound on it a little bit too.
There are some legit reasons for P2P. Doesn't Kazaa scan your entire hard drive for files to share if you just blindly click through the installation process? Could he not just swing it as a case of negligence?
Garmin Mobile XT will let you do this on its own with as many waypoints as you want to set. It is much easier to create the routes on a PC with a combination of various mapping programs though - I think Mapsource lets you define a bunch of points to route through, like others have said, it is a sequential solution, pretty handy though.
My GPS handles this whole problem for me, I just feed it a few waypoints and it figures out some nifty turn by turn navigation to calculate the shortest distance or fastest travel time depending on traffic congestion, speed traps and limits, and so forth. It does connect to the net to get the latest traffic conditions though, so it's not completely self contained.
Even better, Garmin Mobile XT works on my N95, so no need to rip the car GPS out of the dash when taking a walk.
Yes, but not for the school, and that's what matters!
Insightful? Maybe in opposite land. Perhaps you just missed the memo, it's every person for themselves. I think you need to visit a few of these under-developed nations and take a look at how the other half actually live. What you so outwardly judge as infantile, I see with my own eyes as truly identical, first world, and absolutely no different to any other country on the planet. Corporate greed in America has the same underpinnings the world over. The people at the top want more money and power, they will do whatever it takes to get it. End of story.
I think I prefer to live in one of these countries you appear to despise, I actually have significantly more freedom and a far better standard of living than I could ever have in my country of origin (Australia), and it all comes at a fraction of the price.
The upshot is that it only took 7 minutes to map out the entire island with one of your crazy taxi drivers :-) I kid! I kid!
Smaller localized footprints are useful in large central business districts where there are many service providers and tall buildings, or inside shopping centers, subways, and other high traffic areas, but errors in this type of positioning could easily be as high as 30 kilometers once you start heading out of the major centers. I'd prefer to know exactly where I am with a real GPS and the luxury of turn by turn navigation, even if I am just out walking.
No, you mean there will be a manufacturer approved method of creating 3rd party applications, it has nothing to do with legality, and everything to do with the corporate bottom line. I'll likely be similar to the current Symbian 3rd edition stuff, pretty much useless for the types of people that are currently doing these modifications.
Above, the textbook definition of a domain squatter.
Part of the problem with this approach is that a growing number of places that provide whois lookups also limit the number of requests that can be made from a single IP per minute/hour/day etc. Flooding is likely to get noticed very quickly, the best shot as others have said would be encryption.
WTF would the vast majority of people living in Australia right NOW need to say sorry for? Sorry for the atrocities a bunch of retards (many long since dead) undertook while the current population was, at best, running around in nappies with no idea about the world around them.
Saying sorry is very probably a bad idea, it's an acknowledgment that will likely be followed by a bunch of arsehat lawsuits from a load of morons that are 6 generations down the line from the actual 'stolen' individual, though they'll still be taken seriously and wind up with a nice little golden parachute at the expense of contemporary society.
Why would sorry need to be said now, almost 40 years after what is arguably the last occurrence? Why was it not said back then? And given that the whole issue is still clouded in huge amounts of controversy, the realities are likely to be a tad different. A lot of these children were abandoned by their own parents anyway, they were cared for by the government, not stolen. This is not to say it never happened, just that people should slow down a touch and open their eyes.
What are Australian schools churning out these days, it's than, not then.
And if you did routinely break encryption, the moment you act on anything you have decrypted is the same moment that you would start to come under much closer scrutiny. Your secret would not stay secret for long.
Disgruntled Ex Defence Signals Directorate Drone.
Nope, it's just plain old copyright infringement. Stealing would require that some physical object be intentionally taken from its owner without permission.
Adding 8 gigabytes to the Nokia N95 didn't increase its initial selling price by much at all. The price has actually fallen quite a good deal over the last couple of months and is now just a small amount above the original N95.
Phones are not designed to be given away for free at all, you just need to read the fine print on your contract a little better. In nearly all cases you end up paying a significant amount more for a contract phone than you would if you had just purchased it outright from the beginning.
The iPhone is not worth much of a second glance here in Asia. It simply wont compete, the reason for this is because it actually does lack a crap load of functionality (despite your opinion to the contrary) that has been bog standard in many phones over here for the last couple of years.
Ahhh, yes, but I'm not in your back yard, so what you feel as unjust or otherwise is of no consequence to me. :-)
While I can't speak for the NSA or US laws, in Australia anyone at all can set up an organisation like the Defence Signals Directorate. It is fully legal to monitor communications of foreign origin and destination. For private individuals the vast majority of domestic transmissions are also legal to intercept. (Some exclusions surrounding radio based telephony exist) The government does have far more restrictions imposed on what they can and can't do than the general population. The DSD is prohibited from monitoring all domestic transmissions - with some exceptions. Perhaps much less widely known is that it is entirely legal for the DSD to receive domestic non-communications type signals such as RADAR. The laws are all open for public viewing. Three letter agencies like the DSD are quite transparent in what they can and cannot do. How they do it is what remains secret.
--
Signed 'Ex one of Them'