
Verizon kills the SMS market singlehandedly - jkopelman
http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2008/10/us_aggregators_stunned_at_verizons_003_mt_transaction_fees_increase.html
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thorax
I was hoping to read that "kills the SMS market" meant _finally_ one of the
carriers destroyed the market in the sense that it was now free and all other
carriers would have to follow suit. :(

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jsdalton
If only in killing it they would inadvertently spur the development of an
alternative... It seems to me that there are almost enough smart phones on the
market that an alternative (free) messaging protocol could get a foothold, and
if it gained traction there the mobile service providers could no longer
ignore demand for cost-free messaging.

This is probably just wishful thinking though. :(

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jmarinez
Verizon has backtracked on the issue. It was just a "proposal" for discussion.
Sure...

Here's the latest directly from the horse's mouth:

"As Verizon Wireless continues to review the competitive marketplace, we
constantly work to provide additional value to our customers, employees and
other stakeholders.

We are currently assessing how to best address the changing messaging
marketplace, and are communicating with messaging aggregators, our valued
content partners, our technology business partners and, importantly, our
friends in the non-profit and public policy arenas.

To that end, we recently notified text messaging aggregators - those for-
profit companies that provide services to content providers to aggregate and
bill for their text messaging programs - that we are exploring ways to offset
significantly increased costs for delivering billions upon billions of text
messages each month.

Specific information in one proposal, which would impose a small per-message
fee on for-profit content aggregators for commercial messages, has been
mistakenly characterized as a final decision to implement. We don’t envision
this type of change to in any way affect non-profit organizations or political
and advocacy organizations.

We have not increased the per-message cost to aggregators since our messaging
service began in 2003, and we have never envisioned a cost to consumers or
content companies, but rather on content aggregators themselves. That draft
was intended to stimulate internal business discussions and in no way should
have been been released to the public and represented as a final document.

At Verizon Wireless, we strive to provide our messaging customers with maximum
value, and work to implement business decisions that encourage the use of
messaging between individuals and organizations in both the marketplace of
ideas and the commercial marketplace, and we will continue to strongly
encourage the use of our services by charitable organizations as they perform
their good works."

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swombat
Oh well, over here in the UK it's way more expensive than that, and has always
been so.

And the SMS services industry in the UK is absolutely thriving! Let me see...
there's... SMS ringtones... SMS porn... that's about it I think.

Yeah, ok, fair enough, "kill" is not an exaggeration.

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kolya3
SMS ringtones and SMS porn are all premium services and naturally are not be
affected by a 3 cent transaction fee. This hurts companies that send out free
opt in SMS alerts and subsidize them with advertising at the bottom of the
message. Up until now, their model was to build up scale which gets them a
lower per message fee with the aggregators. However even with large volumes
their margins are a few cents at best. This 3 cent "transaction fee" kills
them.

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eru
Porn in 160 characters?

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pmjordan
Back when phones with monochrome displays were common, I did indeed see
adverts for pornographic wallpapers, which, as far as I know, were submitted
via specially encoded SMS. These days I'm guessing they use MMS.

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Xichekolas
Kind of an exaggerated headline. They might be killing the market for bulk
messaging by businesses to users, but not the _whole SMS market_... the
majority of which is user-to-user and already more expensive than 4 cents per
SMS.

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jonknee
SMS will be fine, more popular than ever even. SMS advertising/marketing to
VZW customers may have some trouble, which I'm not mad about.

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callmeed
I wonder if this affects texts sent via an email->SMS gateway. I'm working on
a small project that uses SMS, but we're just emailing them to
number@smsgateway.com.

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jonknee
It quite obviously does not. Who would they send the bill to?

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callmeed
I'm sure there's a team of Verizon folks somewhere trying to figure out a way
:)

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Angostura
I wonder to what extent this will put a dent in Twitter.

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pmjordan
Well, Europe recently lost its Twitter SMS service. I'm guessing they'll move
to a premium plan.

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PJGoldwing
Anybody with legal knowledge - Would this allow a dissatisfied customer to
prematurely cancel his Verizon contract?

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rcoder
It's not a change in billing to _you_ , so I doubt it would apply. Unless by
"customer," you mean "bulk SMS business customer."

