AT&T Kills $10 Texting Plan, Pushes $20 Plan

Hugh Pickens writes "AT&T is scrapping its 1,000-texts-for-ten-bucks plan and replacing it with a plan that offers unlimited texts for $20. Users who don't want the unlimited plan can opt to pay 20 cents per text. Current AT&T subscribers are grandfathered in, so you can stick with whatever plan you selected when you signed your contract. 'The vast majority of our messaging customers prefer unlimited plans and with text messaging growth stronger than ever, that number continues to climb among new customers,' says AT&T. The news has not been received warmly in the tech blogosphere. 'AT&T calls this "streamlining." We call it what it is: an outrageous, gigantic scam,' writes Sam Biddle in Gizmodo. 'AT&T's taken away new customers' option to spend less, whereas carriers like Verizon still offer tiered texting plans for varying budgets.'"

Re:Since text messages cost sooooo much to carry

[ffejie]

Do you think that companies charge you what things cost to make? Do you think that it costs Fiji Water twice as much as Aquafina to bottle H2O? Newsflash: businesses charge on value, derived from what people are willing to pay, not based on what it costs them to produce such items. In cases of price gouging, competitors come into the market and undercut the original producer. In the case of Mobile Wireless, apparently it's a little bit trickier to upend the market, due to the massive capital infusion it would require to build out a national network.

Texting is free on all carrieres

[RobinEggs]

Don't forget that text message costs are exclusively determined by lying to you and constant bullshit experiments in "what the market will bear".

Texting is almost completely free for carriers. The messages piggyback to and from your phone in the spare bandwidth of the tower synchronization signals the phone uses to check reception and select towers for voice/data transmission. The only infinitesimal cost that might exist to the carrier is transmitting 140 lousy bytes from one tower to another tower; the capacity on the towers themselves is free.

Now this might have changed somewhat in recent years; I'm not a communications engineer. But I don't think it has. And I'd bet my life that even if it has, texts still don't cost the carriers more than 0.1 cents.

This is the very picture of evil corporate overlords plotting in a dark tower to see how much money they can squeeze out of you for nothing and avoid advancing technology as long as possible. Real technology entrepreneurs like George Eastman struggled constantly against themselves, trying to make things cheaper and better for the consumer. Eastman in particular tried desperately to obsolete his own products in favor of offering consumers even better, years before the prior product would otherwise have dropped in sales; today we call that cannibalism, and most tech companies struggle like hell to avoid a whit of it. (People acted like Apple was batshit crazy for not better managing their product line when iphones started to cannibalize ipods. Nevermind that iphones cost hundreds more, so even that cannibalism is pure profit.)

When's the last time you saw a company that put out everything they had, every time, and didn't hold something back for upgrade cycles or a magical September festival of worship?

Re:Hmm...

[rickb928]

GSM was the initial platform for SMS. In fact, Deutsche Telekom was an early collaborator and help design the spec we have now.

SMS was initially designed to use a control channel in GSM, It has, of course, expanded to be used in AMPS (now dead), CDMA, and TDMA. This allowed it to use a service not needed for voice calls (and I assume for data nowadays), but imposed some limitations on the amount of data, both in terms of speed and limiting utilization to avoid interfering with necessary functions. The control channel is also used for call setup, among other things.

While this control/signalling channel is built into the GSM specs, it is used for other things, such as set registration and call setup/teardown, so using it 'for free' isn't as simple as ti seems, and it is limited by the protocl that it uses, 160 characters per 'message'. And SMS does require some 'back office' servers and data systems to function, and exchange with other carriers. SMS isn't free, but it is being sold for up to 400 times the profit margin similar data volumes are sold for as what we thing of as 'data' service. Landline telcos did the same thing, charging hugely for in-state toll calls, even to a neighboring town, and discounting nationwide toll calls dramatically. We might see some action some day by the FCC to more appropriately price SMS, unless they buy the argument that the real costs in SMS are handling the messages as they traverse the system. There is some cost and effort in processing >120 Billion SMS a month in the US alone, or 7-87 Trillion SMS worldwide per year.

Other bits of trivia:

SMS is by design a best-effort delivery system. Delivery is not guaranteed. But when was the last time you lost one? I remember when AT&T TDMA service would lose SMS for a few days, and then I would get them all in a flood. I miss my old Nokia 5150, great phone. The Siemens S46, on the other hand...

A5/1 or A5/2 encryption is used, which is weak enough to be trivially broken. There are open-source GMS implementations that let you force an unencrypted connection and own, presumably, all the data, including SMS. If you're into that sort of thing.

The SMS control channel doesn't need much of a signal to function. You can often get an SMS out even if there is no discernable signal being displayed on your phone, and can't even get an emergency call out.

Before GSM developed GPRS, you could use SMS as a 'bearer' or data packet for WAP. I had a phone that did this, and it was no worse than GPRS, which is bad enough. But WAP didn't really take off like this, since you would be locating your WAP server inside the carrier's network, just not feasible. The control channel back then was adequate for very lightweight WAP. There are plenty of places in rural America where you can be stuck with GPRS speeds, usually 8kb/s. I vacation near one. It's fun. iPhone users on AT&T sometimes get a little crazy there.