Imagine how many billion more messages a day would be sent if Cingular (and Verizon and T-Mobile)* caught up with the rest of the world and stopped charging for incoming SMSs. This also, one would think, make it harder for alert or info services to really take off. And why charge different for international messages?
Link: Cingular text messaging for your cell phone- FAQs.
What is the pricing for Text Messaging?
All Cingular customers with Text Messaging-capable phones are pre-activated to send and receive messages at $0.10 per message with no monthly charge. Or, you can sign up for a more economical Text Messaging package.What is the pricing for international text messaging?
It’s just $0.20 to send an international message. Sent messages are not pulled from your bucket of messages. International text messages received will either pull from your message bucket or be charged a normal per-message charge.
On the flip side, email to phone via the phone’s email address (based on the number) is pretty nifty. Now that’s something I can understand charging receipt for (an option?). But, really, it’s unfair to make users pay for something that they cannot control. At least they can choose to not answer a voice call. But an SMS? Imagine spamming someone in spite, racking up their SMS bills.
OK, so I’m not saying anything new here, but had to vent. Been doing some service analysis here today and it just bugs me when I have to figure in reluctant users. :-/
*When I was looking at Sprint, I couldn’t even tell if text massaging was included in basic plans, not how much it cost. Wow, I guess billions of messages a day still doesn’t trump voice calling. Bad, Sprint. No cookie.
With T-Mobile, it’s also not in the basic plan, but at least they make it easy to add and it’s prominently marketed in the service (T-zones) section. Eh, half-credit there.
Man, this kills me. But it gets worse – many people pay 25c/picture message, or 1c/K multimedia message/internet access. And for most of the year, Cingular was charging 3c/K for multimedia messages. So a 500K lifeblog post off of my 6670 would cost around 20 dollars to post.