
Text Messaging and a $130 billion profit pool waiting to be disrupted - titocosta
http://titocosta.tumblr.com/post/67155178/text-messaging-and-a-130-billion-profit-pool-waiting
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geuis
So here's the problem as I see it. It's very easy to send SMS via email
because most carriers provide an email gateway for their SMS services.
However, people use SMS by phone number. The use-by-number paradigm is one
that is hard to break, because that is the one thing the carriers won't open
up. SMS is tucked into a small portion of the cell signal, which is why the
character limit is around 180 characters.

It's easy to write a 3rd party solution for smart phones, say like an IM or
twitter client. But how do you open access to the hundreds of millions of
people with regular phones. I think if someone can figure that out, you have a
business model

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aantix
I am thinking about writing an app centered around SMS messages. I'm leaning
towards sending out the text messages via the provided carrier email gateways
(since it's free). I mainly concentrated on US based cell customers.

Will the carrier bock my domain if I start sending 5,000 emails to subscribed
cell customers on their network?

Do you have any real-world experience with sending large number of text
messages via the various carrier email gateways? What are some of the gotchas?

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titocosta
I think you might run into breach of the guidelines of the mobile marketing
association. All messages application to mobile should be sent from a short
code, to make it easy to opt-out. See <http://www.mmaglobal.com/policies/code-
of-conduct>

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joshsharp
I always thought that SMS is something that would die along with traditional
mobile networks. When new standards like WiMax become fully adopted then
mobile carriers become obsolete, as do arbitrary protocols like SMS. We end up
with everything-over-IP and short text messages become just another way to
receive data (with appropriate costs!).

Having said that I think that currently SMS is more convenient than email, and
perhaps a new short message standard should be considered to replace SMS.
There are tradeoffs, though - if we switch to email then I have a way of
receiving messages at multiple locations, eg. indexing my conversations on my
PC as well as having them pushed to my device.

SMS is definitely a stop-gap that will die out when IP reigns supreme.

~~~
eru
The high cost of SMS has benefits, though. Shouldn't it make spam more costly
to send, too?

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mixmax
Interesting to see how the US is a few years behind Europe (or at least
Scandinavia) in the mobile space. Text messaging was all the rage here 5 or 6
years ago.

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axod
It's been 5-10 years behind in terms of technology for years. I simply could
not believe the first time I went over, and people were talking about their
pagers. (In the UK, pagers died out in the 80s).

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RK
As a side question, what is the current roaming situation in Europe? The last
time I had a European phone (a number of years ago), it was very frustrating
to have to pay very high roaming fees as I was traveling in different
countries. I think I had gone with Vodafone, which at the time seemed to have
the best prices and the largest network. Coming from the US, where almost any
plan allows you to call coast to coast with no extra fees, it was frustrating
taking a train for a couple hours and then having to pay 1.50 euro/min or
similar.

~~~
iuguy
The EU put the bosh on it. Roaming within the EU is much cheaper with a pan EU
contract. There is a surcharge if you don't have one but it's not as bad as
before. There's no rules on data though so people get screwed that way.

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mseebach
> There's no rules on data though so people get screwed that way.

To the max.

€7/MB when roaming is pretty average in western Europe. I havn't seen a pan-
Europe flat-rate dataplan. That's not even the worst part, it that there's a
minimum 50kb charge pr. connection. Ick.

Interesting thing is, they route the data via my "home" network, instead of
just dumping it on the nearest internet connection.

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RK
Interesting, I was worried about that the last time I was in Europe (Sept.
2008). When I got my bill from my American provider, I had no extra charges
for data. It looks like, for now things might work better as a non-European
phone user in the Europe, as far as data goes. I'll see what happens on my
next trip this spring.

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colinplamondon
More like it's an international price-fixing scam waiting to get slapped with
an anti-trust lawsuit by the FCC under President Obama.

I'd be absolutely shocked if this continues until 2013.

~~~
axod
In what way is it a price fixing scam??? In the same way your electricity
supply is a price fixing scam?

Please don't believe the idiotic articles claiming that sending an SMS costs
the mobile companies nothing...

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bprater
If all the phone carriers get together and say, "Hey Bob -- if you keep the
price of your SMS at 10c, I promise to keep the price of SMS at 10c. We agree
to not compete on SMS pricing. That way we can make lots of moola on something
that costs both of us nothing."

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russell
That's collusion and it's illegal. They just watch each other. If verizon
doesn't move, Sprint doesn't either. That's also the way airlines match
prices.

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braindead_in
SMS is a great example of "worse is better" paradigm. Several new technologies
have tried to challenge it, MMS, advertising supported SMS come to mind. But
none of them have really displaced it. I think its got to do with the
simplicity. And its usefulness, as an "offline" notification system. Hard to
beat the combination.

The only thing that could replace it is IM clients on Phones. When each and
every phone is always on and when everyone is always signed on, and when
operators are nothing more than bit pipes, SMS's will become pointless. Lots
of if's though. :)

~~~
hv23
Similar to BlackBerry Messenger infrastructure with cross-phone functionality.

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pmb
SMS takes place on the control channel and not the data channel, which has a
far more limited bandwidth. This means that SMS messages have to be queued up
with control messages, and that a flood of SMS messages can disrupt all cell
service in a region. What a stupid design.

And how about that price collusion, eh? They've gone up by a factor of 2 in a
year for no reason at all related to either CAPEX or OPEX...

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halo
I actually quite like SMS. It's cheap enough for anybody to afford yet
expensive enough to prevent idiots and spammers which give it a great signal-
to-noise ratio. It's ubiquitous, push and fast.

There are already alternatives, from e-mail to instant messaging to social
networks, but none of them have the ubiquity, standardisation or simplicity of
SMS.

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AndrewWarner
SMS is convent, but won't scale as it is. It's fine when you get 1 or 2 a day,
but I'm starting to get a dozen. What happens when you have dozenS of
messaging coming in and no way to sort, file, etc? Also, SMS is very bad at
telling you who sent the message. How many times have you gotten an text from
a number that's not in your phone book.

Someone needs to create an alternative. Maybe it can be done on top of
twitter.

~~~
joshsharp
"Twitter is not public infrastructure" as one of the posts linked to on here
yesterday pointed out. Building it into next-gen mobile messaging is a
terrible idea.

Some sort of open standard based on microblogging might be an idea, though.

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eli
Built-in Google Chat on my G1 has completely replaced text messaging for
anyone else with a G1 (or anyone who is sitting in front of gmail).

Not only is it free (with unlimited data plans), it's better than SMS because
it adds presence, away messages, and the ability to instantly take a PC-based
IM chat on the road, or vice versa.

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davidw
I think something like Facebook might be in a good position to do an SMS
replacement app and put some muscle behind it. Most people I know are on there
already, and others would probably join if they could send SMS's for less
money.

