
SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble - drm237
http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html
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jsdalton
It doesn't just cost consumers either. If you're a developer who wants to
implement SMS in an app, you're looking at probably $.05 per message, maybe
shaving a bit off with a volume buy.

I had a fun app that I have largely given up on once I realized it was just
too cost prohibitive to offer the service for free and allow SMS messaging.

(This was using Clickatell btw.)

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breck
Is this true? My server sends SMS' to cells without problems. I've been
sending them to email addresses like 6175551234@vtext.com (for a verizon
cell). Is it because my volume is low that I am allowed to do this for free,
or because I am using the email address format?

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jsdalton
Yeah, you can send them via email for free. There may or may not be other
restrictions that I"m aware of.

Your method, however, requires the user to know the provider of the number. In
the application I had made, users could send messages via SMS by just typing
in the number.

(Also, at least for my own provider, AT&T, some crud ends up in the message,
e.g the subject line of the email.)

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breck
Thanks. I hope there aren't restrictions but if there are, I'll find out the
hard way in the next few months. Yeah, crud ends up in my Verizon messages to.
I'm using PHP though and have been able to mess around with headers and such
to send clean messages.

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grahamr
As a customer, I hate getting gouged by text messaging.

As an entrepreneur, it gives me hope that there are useful services which
people are willing to pay for directly. The social/viral distribution of sms
is impressive: it costs me to send a message to my friends, and I'm
encouraging them to spend money with their provider in order to respond.

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hugh
I really don't see that "dollars per byte" is a sensible way to measure the
price of transferring data.

If it makes you feel any better, think of the SMS fee it as a five pence fee
for establishing the connection, and then a negligible per-byte cost which
gets rounded down to zero cents. Happy now? Is five pence really all that
unreasonable a price for sending a message?

Don't get me wrong: phone companies do all sorts of things which are annoying,
overpriced and/or unethical, but I don't see this as one of them.

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redorb
this kind of gouging has to turn off consumers. I know when I heard a gallon
of inkjet ink was $4,000 I immediately started looking for better solutions

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xirium
By volume, inkjet ink is more expensive than vintage champagne. By volume, SMS
is more expensive than hand delivered postcards. There's no excuse for such
gouging.

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aston
By volume, 20oz bottled water is more expensive than gasoline. And will
continue to be so until gas hits $7/gallon.

Smart industries charge what the market will bear.

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cstejerean
I don't know if gasoline in 20oz containers would be any cheaper than water.

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petercooper
Talk about comparing apples to oranges. I could send a few terabytes (or 100
32GB SD cards) from one location to another for about $20 and compare the
costs of sending data on the Internet unfavorably to it. Like this, however,
such a comparison would make no sense.

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henning
OK, let's talk about how sending data via SMS is astronomically more expensive
than sending data over a standard broadband Internet connection, a more
terrestrial comparison.

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hugh
Why not talk about how, for most short messages, sending an SMS is cheaper
than making a phone call to transmit the same information?

The real question is: who says that the cost of transmitting information
should be linear with the amount of data? If you want to transmit a hundred
bytes then SMS is a good way to do it. If you want to transmit five gigs, then
some other way would be better.

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henning
Because that's how things work in a lot of other services?

For instance, if you sign up for shared hosting and go over your alloted
bandwidth, they may charge you $0.50 a gigabyte or so. That is linear and it
seems reasonable.

What would happen if you could stream high-quality video from mobile phones?
With large data transfer capabilities would come interesting new possibilities
for markets, companjies, and customers.

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henning
Talk to someone in the mobile industry and they'll brush this off as "not
being afraid to charge for value", or at least that's how someone like Russell
Beattie describes it.

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xlnt
Which "value" is he referring to? It seems more like they charge this much
because consumers lack better options than to put up with it.

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henning
People find rationalizations for doing unethical things.

I'm sure oil executives talk with each other about, literally, powering
America.

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eru
What is wrong about powering America?

