Technobabble

SMS – Text Messaging Rip Off?

Posted by on Jan 16, 2007 | 3 Comments

Check your mobile bills, my friends. Three of the big four cellular phone service providers are upping their per-message SMS rates for many by a whopping 50%. It all began with Sprint Nextel, then Cingular, and now Verizon … they’re all lining up to take advantage of the unwary. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this remarkable leap in rates may allow you to jump ship on your current cellphone contract.

MobileTracker has some interesting coverage on what they’ve deemed the SMS price increase club.

I’ve yet to see any convincing justification from the industry. By gosh, someone might even say that the sudden across-the-board increase in text messaging pricing constitutes price fixing. Now I wouldn’t say that, of course, but someone might …

Three years ago, I learned about the hidden costs of text-messaging the hard way … with a 52 page long phone bill and a $150 charge for my pre-teen’s text-messaging spree. d’oh!

[tags]SMS, text messaging[/tags]

  • Robert

    SMS fees are rip-off in so many ways. SMS traffic is the most efficient traffic on the network, yet the carriers charge the most for it. Why? Market demand. Most teens have no use for voice comm — all they want is SMS.

    We have an AT&T family talk plan w/1400 shared minutes with unlimtied M2M time. And NO SMS. I completely disabled the feature.

    How utterly absurd. We can talk M2M for FREE and have bucks of low-efficiency talk minutes. Yet it would cost $30(!) to add unlimited, HIGHLY EFFICIENT text messages. I even have unlimited internet and email access on my smartphone for $20. Again, far less efficient.

    I guess it’s a good thing, really. All those carpel-tunnel teens with their text-messaging crack addition are subsidizing the 3G roll out that I am enjoying! I couldn’t give a fig about SMS — it’s the least useful service to me.

    Oh, and good job on your dumbass anti-spam capcha. Glad I saved the message on the clipboard since it was G-O-N-E when I hit the back button.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jenil.franco Jenil Franco

    Constant dissapearence of the top free or top paid tab in the app store is still there.
    Sometimes theres a restart of springboard.
    and in the usage, the usage after full charge and standby are the same.
    i dont know if thats a bug or if the phone is constanly in use even when locked.
    and some apps havent gotten updated yet, but thats not a major issue tho.

  • http://twitter.com/joshthehappy Josh the Happy

    if you want a FREE $15 ITUNES GIFT CARD follow these directions:
    1) install the shopkick app from the app store.
    2) after clicking “let’s do it” (haha) click cancel at the top left of your screen.
    3) go to the “me tab at the bottom left of your ipod/iphone.
    4) click the ” got a promo code? box and on the next screen type in mink8492
    this works on all ipods/iphones jailbroken or not.