We all use it. It's simple, time-saving and to the point. Sometimes you need to pass along a message, "The movie starts at 7," without engaging the in the ritual of conversation. A typical phone conversation requires dialing a number, listening to the ringing (or heaven forbid, custom music selections), a simple greeting, "Hello," self-identification, the content of the call, and a farewell, "Goodbye, et al."
A text gets it done so much quicker in those situations. And the treatment it gets on my iPhone makes it so much more useful, storing the conservation thread so you can follow discussions, including dates and times. But there is one drawback: carriers are fleecing us with unnecessary charges. Apple forced 200 free messages to be included in the original iPhone's contract. Most customers aren't so lucky. And many of us have jumped over that number, only to pay $.10, $.15 or now often $.20 per message. For a brief time, I even chose the $10/month option to have 1500 messages.
But it turns out, Short Message Service is a simple, almost free burden for carriers. You see, the messages are carried on the bandwidth already reserved for control channels. As long as they're short, they aren't taking up any space. A quote from the linked article states that there really is no difference for a carrier to handle 1 million messages or 100 million. But carriers keep cranking up the fees.
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
