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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
12/29/08
No reasons really other than abbrevs are annoying.
12/29/08
12/29/08
in Japan, the person initiating the call or text pays for the transmission AND reception... the person who answers does not pay for the call while the caller pays up to 40 yen per minute. it's actually the caller paying 30 yen per minute plus the 10 yen per minute the person receiving the call would normally pay (on a landline, cellular is more per minute).
here in the states, the caller AND the receiver pay per minute AND per message. if i send a short mail, i pay 25 cents. the person receiving that same short mail ALSO pays 25 cents. each short mail sent, the carrier makes 50 cents.
12/29/08
the difference being in Japan, very few calling plans include any free calling minutes, or at least that's how it was when i lived in Japan from 1996 to 2002... my DoCoMo calling contract had 40 included minutes, free to receive calls, and 2 yen per short mail.
12/29/08
What are any of you going to do about it?
Are you going to cut the cellphone cord? Are you going to drop messaging plans? Are you going to take even an hour out of a day to send a letter to your representatives in Congress?
If not, you're just hand-wringing.
12/29/08
12/29/08
12/29/08
12/29/08
12/29/08
Before people get their panties in a bind over what I'm going to say, I will agree that text messaging is overpriced. The reason it is overpriced is not because of the size of the messages, but because of the relative time insensitivity of a text message.
Another way to visualize how text messaging is transmitted is to think of it like closed captioning on a TV. Closed captioning is shoe-horned into the space between frames.
There is only a fixed amount of control channel bandwidth. Suggesting that sending small messages over a smaller portion of the overall cellular bandwidth costs nothing is inaccurate. In all likelihood, it requires more overhead relative to the payload than call data, contrary to what the article suggests.
Now, the reason I think they're overpriced is because of the relative insensitivity of text messages to latency. You're not going to realize if a text message gets to you some fractions of a second, or even seconds later than you expected. Now, you can bet the farm on people being pissed about service and call quality issues arising from network congestion and latency issues.
Personally, I really don't care if they treat my precious text messages like insignificant garbage, as long as my calls are essentially guaranteed to be completed. Additionally, I don't mind that they make some money off trying to use their bandwidth to its full potential. (even if it is a killing)
Put the telecoms up against the oil companies and it's apparent that they're not really fleecing anyone.
There really is no winning with some of you people. The same people that will complain about the price of text messages, are the same people that will complain about an "excessively sized" shipping container. When a cellular company uses their excess air (recycling bandwidth) to make a buck, they'll still complain.