Verizon To Charge Content Providers $.03 Per SMS 260
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Verizon is going to start double-dipping by charging both consumers AND content providers for SMS text messages. Verizon has informed content partners that it will levy a $.03 charge for messages sent to customers, effective November 1. From RCRWireless: 'Countless companies could be affected by the new fee, from players in the booming SMS-search space (4INFO, Google Inc. and ChaCha) to media companies (CNN, ESPN and local outlets) to mobile-couponing startups (Cellfire) to banks and other institutions that use mobile as an extension of customer services.'"
Email-to-SMS Gateways? (Score:3, Interesting)
Two Verizon stories in a row, neat.
Does anything prevent content providers from using the email-to-SMS gateways to send messages for free? I know some companies who do this...
It requires the customer to tell you their carrier of course, and you need to have an up-to-date list of email-to-SMS gateway addresses for each carrier, but hey, it's free.
i used to sms a lot (Score:5, Interesting)
but now everyone i know pretty much can email with their phones. and if not, there's an sms-email gateway, where you type their [phone number]@vzw.net or something like that. of course they have to pay for that, but if they reply, it comes in as a regular email, so you don't have to pay anything
such that i'm thinking of shunning sms use completely
sms is a wonderfully useful little signalling protocol... if it weren't being milked to death. so it will be discarded from general use, killed off by the phone company
Post Office Tax (Score:5, Interesting)
cancel your verizon subscription today (Score:5, Interesting)
so now verizon is charging other people money to *call you*. aren't you alrady paying verizon to have a phone number just so people can call you and send you messages.
you would have to be a real sucker to let verizon charge your friends and associates money to communicate with you, on top of what they are already paying *their* phone company to send the message in the first place.
Re:They have it all wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
While we're pony-wishing, I want to be able to choose which companies are charged how much to send me a text message.
Google-411: $0.00
Verizon: $1.50
Timing is suspect (Score:3, Interesting)
I know I need to loosen my tinfoil hat, but the article specifically mentions the Obama campaign's reliance on SMS as an organizational tool. I think it's safe to say that Verizon and its little friends are big fans of the current surveillance-friendly administration, seeing as how the W administration just gave the telcos the world's largest "Get Out Of Jail Free" card with their little "retroactive immunity" bill.
Verizon couldn't have waited until December? Or November 15? Or November 5? No, they flip the switch just in time to make it more difficult for tech-savvy candidates (largely Democratic, hmmm) to send "don't 4get 2 vote!" reminders to their followers. Obama won't have any problems -- he could likely afford the "Free-2-End-User" service -- but smaller campaigns might have to drop their SMS reminder plans completely.
Of course, I'm suspicious of the way gas prices suddenly drop in October of years divisible by 4, too. :)
*shrug* vote with your feet (Score:5, Interesting)
As a consumer, there are a number of carriers available. If you don't like Verizon's policies, just switch to one of the other US providers like AT&T/Sprint/T-Mobile. But this fee seems designed to soak service providers to Verizon's customers. They are much more likely to bend over and do some yodeling rather than forego the ability to sell things (or display ads/information) to Verizon customers.
Just another in the long series of customer unfriendly business decisions made by Verizon's management.
Cheers,
Re:Just crazy... (Score:1, Interesting)
Charging to send AND receive? Greedy bastards should be lined up against the wall and shot.
Which is why in the US you've never been charged to receive calls. ... Well, except on cell phones.
Because apparently they're not the same as those old phones, and are so extra-special that you just have to be dinged for receiving calls.
And since you pay for receiving calls, you pay for receiving text messages too, because they're so new and different or something. (Something about boiling a frog?)
It's insane. It's like those people who can't use Word if you change their desktop wallpaper. People in the US are just incapable of applying the same logic that's applied to traditional phones for the past, well, century to mobile phones.
Then again, as the whole load crisis has proved, the US has given up on critical thinking.
Re:Yay for double-dipping (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Greed (Score:4, Interesting)
A fair price would be the same as all other data transfers. It's all bits anyway. You should pay the same price for a given number of bits, no matter what protocol you're using.
Re:They have it all wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
How about this plan: Receiver specifies a white list. SMS from a white-listed sender charges the receiver otherwise it charges the sender. Also provide a way for the sender to check if a receiver has them white listed.
With this plan spammers gets charged, but you can pay for any opt-in services you want by white-listing them.
(Yes, I realize how close this is to many e-mail spam prevention proposals. However, I think that since the SMS infrastructure is already doing accounting, this sort of thing might work with SMS where it has failed with e-mail.)
Re:Greed (Score:1, Interesting)
The article is tagged greed because Verizon is charging both the sender and the receiver of the messages. It would be like the post office sending you a monthly bill for every item of mail you receive (whether you requested that mail or not), even though all the mail was paid for with a stamp by the sender.
I am all for sender-pays messages. It puts the onus of payment where it belongs: the party choosing to engage in communication. It can cut down on spam, and it still allows me to receive messages from content providers (the content providers can always charge me for the service).
SMS over data connection? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Post Office Tax (Score:3, Interesting)
I do not see how verizon could bill an arbitrary commercial interest to send a message to a customer on it's network. Even if they did identify the interest, there would be no contract established, so even though they could bill, it is unclear if they could collect. it would be more likely that verizon would get sued for mail fraud. It is like the sigs on some of the posts that read 'by reading this post you agree to pay me $10", except that the sig seems to have some basis in what some software vendors consider law.
SMS is a profit center and it seems reasonable to push that profit center by asking partners to pay more. It seems reasonable to the consumer because such commercials interests might keep their lists up to date to make sure they are not sending messages to people who do not want them. The only people it will hurt are the commercial content providers, who may find that the promotional agreement with verizon does not have any value. I decided many years ago that Verizon provided me, the customer, with no value.
Re:They have it all wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
I quit because of Sprint's customer service, too. Shame, because I rather liked that weird Sanyo phone that I had.
For anyone that cares, the customer service rep, and then his manager tried to tell me that it was impossible for me to check minutes on my two phones after I'd been doing it for over a year. Weird, weird, experience.
Re:They have it all wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Better idea: you're already paying an outrageous amount for data services (yes, voice is data), and as text messages are well under a kilobyte even with various overhead, they should all be free. Period. Even at 1c/1000 messages, they'd still be turning a hefty profit, percentage-wise anyways. If Amazon charges 10c/GB for S3 traffic and doesn't lose money, cell carriers can easily get away with 1c/MB - it's not up to their usual levels of extortion, but it's still basically free money.
Seriously, data is so damn cheap in absolutely any other market (even in places with stupidly low monthly caps like Australia) but not only will the cellular industry not cut us a break on the service that costs by far the least to provide, but they take that as an opportunity to screw us over the hardest.
I hope all content providers immediately drop support for sending texts to Verizon customers, with a clear explanation that it's due to their greed. That way they'll lose all of the revenue on both sides, not to mention get all of Verizon's customers pissed.