Since when is making money illegal in the US?

I don’t know why people are dismissing the .20 cents per message price. If AT&T advertised that price (as they’ve been doing for hours now), it’s not unreasonable to expect a multi-billion dollar company to honor their advertised price. If AT&T *does* mean .20$ per message, or 20 cents, then I smell a class-action law suit coming.

This error is all the more egregious in light of the “verizon math” problems, as #37 referenced.

Interesting way of putting the cost of SMS. Never in Europe it was done like this. Reality is that SMS are not using IP technology and so comparing it in price/mb is not really a good idea.
SMS succeeded in Europe before mobile IM and mobile internet.
It starts to work in US even though mobile IM and mobile internet has a good footprint…so why? because it is easy, fast, garanteed delivery on time. Hence people are ready to pay more for it !

SMS is dead, and pricing is but one of the nails that will seal its coffin. Others:
* Cheap smart phones will enable mobile email for all. Yeah, data plans are more than unlimited SMS, but people will wind up choosing only one, and
* SMS doesn’t do multipoint or attachments well, and
* you can give out email addresses without worrying about people calling you later (hello, ladies), and
* you can pick up email from multiple devices. SMS is phone only, and
* you can save/file/tag email messages, but not SMS.

RE AT&T: When I signed up with them a few years ago forwarded calls (fwd to home number when home - bad coverage area) cost you minutes against your plan. 3 months into a 1-year contract they changed pricing on me (!) to charge forwarded calls at 25 cents/minute. They tried to charge me a disconnect fee, gave that up, but I could never get a refund for the phone. Then they didn’t return the positive balance on my account for months. The iPhone looks fun, but I’ll wait a couple of years for it to come out on a different carrier.

That is sick

Probably AT&T wants to help the neighbor Rogers with these ridiculous rates. Time to start a site like Ruinediphone.com (previously f@#kyourogers.com).

48 is right. Much cheaper not to get the txt msg plan. But I’m sure the .20 cents is an error. Glad I printed this out and will be bringing it along when I sign up. Because no one likes false advertising.

I think AT&T means 20 cents and not 0.20 cents. On their Messaging FAQs page , they state:

“All AT&T customers with Text Messaging-capable phones are pre-activated to send and receive messages at $0.20 per message with no monthly charge. Or, you can save money and sign up for a Text Messaging package.”

With this pricing plan, iPhone is dead. Bye bye, apple unless you open the phone for competition.

News just to hand, if you buy water in bottles rather than out of the tap, it costs about a thousand times as much!

Residents of Melbourne, Australia would each pay $500,000 each year if they bought all their water in bottles from a shop. (Based on $2 for a 500ml bottle, water consumption in Melbourne 500 Giga litres a year, population of Melbourne approx 4 million).

Outrage, something must be done!

These firms price per consumer perceived value. They have certainly done tons of market research that their analysts interpret to mean that 10 - 20 cents is a reasonable price for the value the consumer receives.

If you sell any product or service you will do better selling value [read: Profit], than cost or saving. People and firms want profits and sales.

People will need to send a message that the present cost structure for text messages is not providing enough value at current prices. The savvy folks that read Tech Crunch are just the people to send the message. You pressure will save us all a load of cash.

That’s my two cents.

46: AT&T has stated that all iPhone owners are eligible to buy at the $199/$299 prices. If you have another AT&T phone and are not yet at the point where your plan is eligible for an upgrade (i.e. because you haven’t reached the point where the subsidy of your existing phone has been paid off), you would not get that pricing.

50: We’ve already seen AOL’s AIM client as one of the debut free apps on the App Store (you can see the icon for it in the iPhone 3G walkthrough video Apple put up today), so it doesn’t look like there will be any limits on IM apps; although it does make one wonder why if Apple is allowing third party IM apps like this, why they don’t go ahead and do iChat too; probably a compromise.

And a bunch of kids in China had figured this out two years back and launched this http://www.zozoc.cn

In Indonesia, a carrier named Esia (myesia.com) created a breaktrough. They charge SMS per character. If you send one character, you pay 1 IDR which equivalent with 0.000109 USD. I think this is the fairest price for consumer.

This is one of those places that really pisses me off about American Cell Phone companies. Japan long ago ditched SMS and just using email for text messages. Generally 6000-12000 character limits. Some of the carriers still have SMS like services but they only work to people on the same carrier. All the rest is just email integrated into the phone.

I’ve ran these numbers before.

If I were to text my entire MP3/Movie collection (230 GIGS) at $0.20 per 160 bytes, it would be:

230 gigs = 235,520 megs = 241,172,480 Kbytes = 246,960,619,520 bytes / 160 bytes per TM = 1,543,503,872 text messages @ $0.20 each = $308,700,774.40 dollars.

63: But this was not the case when they released iphone last year. Anyone could buy at the stated price. This year when the prices are down, why put this condition/clause. i doubt if i am going to buy iphone now

Actually its TWICE as much because they charge both the sender and recipient.

That’s more than the cost of Hubble data transmission.

you know, U.S is not the most developed country in the field of wireless /cell phone. asia has better infrastructure and more attractive service charge. I believe the gap is going to keep increasing. at&t sucks.

Size matters, but the right size here is units of one. In the end the individual is not paying $200K, they are paying $0.20 per text. And if the individual sends more than 75 text messages in a month, the package is the way to average down the price of each text. The author’s argument overlooks per text cost of audit and billing systems. And the author should check the recent sms volumes. Divide texts by the number of mobile subscribers and you’ll see that AT&T picked their time well. Text seems to be a bipolar behavior, you do or you don’t. If you fall into the ‘do’ camp, 75 texts won’t even get you through a week. My 3-person family sent 2625 texts last month — or $0.0111 per message.

Cell companies are like oil companies. They know you need it and want it, and they will charge based on the demand it requires. Sure you have alternatives, but for the cell company, they can capitalize on your need to have it. Just like their 2 year contracts, what if my electric company, gas, cable and other utilities said I had to have 2 year agreements? They get away with because their lobbying dollars allow them to. Remember when it was just 1 year, then competition tighten, so they forced people into 2 years!

your forgetting header information, it would even out to about 200 bytes per

it says .20 cents…not 20 cents…

I don’t use SMS, but don’t they also charge on both ends .You pay separately to send and receive a message. That means they’re really charging $0.40 per message, since the sender pays $0.20 and the receiver pays $0.20. Or am I missing something?

Worse, since I cannot control who sends me messages, I can be forced to pay for message I don’t want. I’ll be first in line for the class action lawsuit that follows.

While I don’t like what carriers do with their pricing of text messaging there are some costs that are being overlooked by the majority of the comments. When a carrier sends a text to another carrier there is a cost involved. There must be joins between the carriers which both must pay for. Internationally this can get quite complex. Here in New Zealand this cost is more clearly reflected where you can buy 2000 texts for $10NZ or half a cent each provided the messages do not pass between carriers ie. no extra cost. Messages to other carriers, in NZ there are 3, are more expensive as each must pay for the function, if at a highly exorbitant rate. Reflected to the customer as 20 cent NZ texts. Internationally texts are 30 cents NZ again reflecting the number of different parties that must handle that message. This is not the internet, there is no Google, services cost money, all of which is reflected by what the customer pays. It is not just data like the internet. It must pass on the inside of the carriers network to other carriers, this is where the extra cost is. I think the carriers could easily bring the cost down, but it is not in their interest to do so.

Had to chime in since there still seems to be a bit of numerical confusion among some folks…not intending to flame anyone.

$0.20 means zero dollars, twenty cents. That’s twenty pennies. Not a fifth of a penny. Were it point-twenty cents per SMS, it would have been written $0.0020.

You all seem to be forgetting that this is also the same rate every other major carrier in America charges.

Here in Australia SMS are 25c each to send. Some carriers have specials where they cost 1c to certain people or during specific periods of the day. It’s all a rip off either way.

Buy a Nokia N95 (or any Symbion Series 3 phone) and install Fring. As long as most everyone else you know has Fring or Email on their phone (and you get an email address when signing up) then it’s essentially free to text as much as you want.

This is idiotic. It doesn’t take into account that fact that SMS uses SS7 transport and not TCP/IP. I’m not a big fan of ATT but if you want to complain start looking at infrastructure costs and write letters to Nortel and Lucent.

While I won’t argue that the rates they charge are fair, one should probably look into HOW SMS works before passing judgement. The Air Interface and channel allocation for SMS is VERY VERY different than the A-Interface for data. Any channels set up for SMS are used for pretty much just that and thats it (this isn’t ENTIRELY true but for the sake of not writing a technical article I won’t go into the details) so any channel set up for SMS CANNOT be used for voice or data traffic whereas certain base stations can be set up to use data channels for either voice or data. The channels used for SMS are control channels (SDCCH or Standalone Dedicated Control Channel) and as their name implies must be dedicated to this task which means that a carrier that has more SMS transmission capability LOSES some voice/data transmission capability. Add to this that not all base stations support the swapping between voice and data channels (meaning you have to dedicate channels to either one or the other) figuring out how to set up your spectrum allocation gets complicated.

Before anyone jumps on me for not knowing what I’m talking about let me say that I work for a small-ish company as a software engineer that make cell phone switching equipment and work with this stuff pretty much every day. Not only that but we recently acquired a company that produces 2G GSM base stations that actually DO support the ability to swap between voice and data one voice/data channels which is nice. This DOES NOT solve the SDCCH issue though as to add more you have to completely reconfigure your base station. unfortunately this is how the GSM protocol works and the way they charge for SMS is at least somewhat related to the protocol itself as it requires the carrier to dedicate (see otherwise give up if not in use for that purpose) resources for SMS in GSM. I don’t, off the top of my head, remember how it works in CDMA as I work more in the GSM side of our software with only occasional forays into the CDMA world (which is fine by me as CDMA is just about dead. At least for what CDMA refers to currently. Technically LTE [4G GSM] is a CDMA style air interface blah blah blah).

Anyway, if anyone would like me to elaborate with a more detailed description I can attempt to do so though one could probably come up with decent descriptions of how things work by a) reading the applicable ITU specs or b) googling GSM SMS and/or SDCCH.

OF COURSE its highway robbery…. OF COURSE its unreasonable…. it is a perfect example of a company completely taking advantage of the uneducated consumer…. the sad part is… even if this became front page news…. most likely nothing would come of it anyway, because for some reason that i will never understand…. the average american today will not fight for what they believe in… wether its for the price of a text message, the fact that we pay extremely high taxes for everything and or even when it comes to the price of gas…. HELLO AMERICA…. IN OTHER COUNTRIES… LIKE FRANCE FOR EXAMPLE… YES FRANCE…. IF ANYTHING EVEN HALF AS BAD HAPPENED IN THEIR COUNTRY… YOU WOULD FIND PEOPLE BANNING TOGETHER TO PROTEST IN THE STREETS….. REMEMBER THIS THE NEXT TIME YOU TEXT A FRIEND OR FILL UP YOUR GAS TANK.

If you don’t like AT&T’s rates, then dont buy the iphone. Apple/AT&T know the mac addicts will bend over and take it if it’s something mac.

I’m with sprint under the sero plan. I pay $30/mo for unlimited data AND text and 500 talk minutes. I haven’t seen anyone yet that can beat that. I can sit on my laptop all day long hooked up to my cell phone and get decent speeds and it costs me $30/mo.

I admit the iphone is very nice, with a nice interface. But that ain’t worth the price in my opinion.

And pretty much all the carriers rip you off for txt messages. Maybe it costs more then 140-160bytes of data. EVen if it’s 1kb of data per SMS, that would still be around $200/meg.

Mike #83 continued….
…… and just as an example as to what im talking about with the majority of americans just ‘grinning and bearing it’ so to speak…. just read #60 above….

I really like AT&T, they are my service provider right now, but something really needs to be done about this.

Wow that is totally insane!

JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi

Overhead, my sweet *ss. What about the overhead on emails and data voice transmissions? It amazes me how many people there are that willingly make themselves into serfs for the corporations: “Yeah, AT&T — lube me up and ride me hard!”

Actually, the euro sign takes up 2 characters in a message, so not all characters take up 1 byte

In a few years TXT msging will be totally dead and we’ll see the merge of more smartphone compatible texting programs that are quicker/free and more useful.

As stated earlier, AIM is expected to appear in the upcoming App Store. If Blackberry, iPhone, and many other users merge to this medium it’ll speed this up even more. Better yet get facebook to integrate something ‘cool’ and free for all the college graduates and trendsetting will start!

chris
http://www.yoursash.com

1 MB = 1024 KB ATT charges $0.01/KB, so 1 MB will cost $10.24.

It’s a rip-off but AT&T is not alone. Sprint unlimited is 20$ and for 5$ you get 300 messages. I’m sure other providers are screwing people as well.

America is capitalism and that = profit. Truth of the matter is that voice transmission costs for modern networks has been measured in hundredths of a cent(USD)/minute since the late 90s and deployment of commercial digital networks. So SMS isn’t the only prevalent revenue stream for wireless carriers.

It would also be noteworthy to point out that even though there is minimal transmission cost(packet switching vs IP), that there are indirect costs to carriers such as dealing with Verisign and the Metcalf system. Which btw touches all SMS intercarrier traffic in the US. It serves a hub to handoff between networks and tracks delivery and potential error states(ACKs, etc). Knowing Verisign, I’m sure that this service isn’t exactly free.

I’m not justifying the industry price point, but I have worked in the industry since 98 and they all follow suit with one another. If one can get away with it, the others will most certainly follow. Wireless revenues also allowed SBC(now AT&T) to complete the Project Pronto initiative(at $11B) which was the inroad to public broadband access as we know it here in the US.

So what, that’s how many smses? Over 6500. The cost of one text message here in Australia is 25c per. Deal with it.

thats why you go to http://sms.dynadel.com

and thats why you a mobile im service on your phone
fuck att& t
dugg
so that moar people will become aware of how much they’re being over charged
time to go watch handcock and wall-e that just finished downloading to my computer ABSOLUTELY FREE

canada are apple frog all right see you letter

Sam, correct post - this is an incorrect analogy… you got a website?
Cheers, mendor_t@hotmail.com

You know in Australia they charge us 25 cents per message…why do you even complain?

Original AT&T iPhone 450 Minute + 200 text message plan…extra texts are only 5 cents each. For the 1500 text plan, only 3 cents each if you go over.

AT&T will always charge you the max amount for everything, so check the going rate every month. don’t be like me spending $50 extra for month for years, just because I did not realize that you have to call and bitch multiple times to get the lowest rates.

Wow, crunchgear can use copy and paste to steal other bloggers research without giving credit. Congrats!

http://gthing.net/the-true-price-of-sms-messages/