Engadget notes:
If you’ve been paying attention to mobile carriers’ SMS pricing lately (and something tells us you haven’t) you’d be surprised to discover a fairly disturbing trend amongst providers: price hikes. ….. What’s most insidious about the inflated costs is the fact that SMS data is particularly low-bandwidth, and analysts say that the price increases aren’t related to higher operating costs — these companies are simply gouging customers for a service which they have embraced.
See the full story here:
Cell phone bill on the rise? Check your SMS charges – Engadget
It has always struck me as odd, and somewhat repugnant, that there should be any charge at all for these short messages – as Engadget notes, they use next to zero bandwidth compared with the bandwidth taken up by voice traffic. You wouldn’t pay a per-message charge to use instant messaging on your computer, yet some folks will pay these ridiculous charges on their cell phones. What’s even more insidious about this is that a primary group of users is kids (teenagers), who send messages to each other simply for social purposes – which means that if a parent cuts their kids off from using the service, it could potentially have a somewhat negative social impact. In such cases the cost causer (the teenager) is often not the one who pays the bills – it’s the parents (of course this is not always the case, but it probably happens in enough families that the phone companies make a tidy profit). I have to wonder how willing the kids are to text with wild abandon, when the charges are coming out of the money they have earned at a summer job?
A decade ago, the phone companies gouged us on long distance charges – now that those are going the way of the dodo, I guess they feel they have to gouge us however they can, while they can. Because of course, as wireless broadband becomes more ubiquitous (giving customers access to services like AIM, ICQ, GTalk, etc.), the need for the phone company’s SMS service will all but disappear – and none too soon, in my opinion!
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eneref said
The phone companies know full well that their primary audience for texting is children, and that parents risk problems if they disallow their children to use those functions. They’re counting on it.
It’s like the Pokemon card games and such that market children. Children can’t afford them, but parents don’t dare say no to a child in this day and age.