175
Why are SMS messages so expensive?
(lemmy.today)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
175 points (94.9% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35729 readers
885 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Where are you that you're paying anything extra for sms? They used to be expensive because they could charge that much, now that are included in even the cheapest prepaid plans. If you are paying per message, that's a you problem and you need to find another wireless provider.
There is a large contrast in this regard between NA and Europe. In Europe data is dirt cheap and wifi is usually available anyways so messaging over whatsapp/signal/whatever is much more common than trying to use SMS. In America public wifi is extremely rare and businesses are so spread out that coverage is limited... people also tend to use iPhones which default you into their shitty iMessage - SMS was also traditionally much cheaper so it's more of a habit in NA.
GSM SMS protocol is the same on both continents. The reason SMS became free in the US with 4G, was as an attempt to level competition for cell phones that weren’t iPhone, since the iMessage protocol uses data transmission rather than SMS. Now that Android uses RCS, which is also data transmission, the only use for SMS is Android to iPhone texting and dumb phones.
None of that is actually true as a contrast.
There are tons of free wifi networks from hotels to restaurants, etc.
None of what you are saying makes any sense.
In Barcelona, I can go for a ten mile walk and constantly be in range of 3+ open wifi networks. In America it's not uncommon to be out of range of wifi when standing on the curb closest to a restaurant or hotel... additionally American wifi networks are much less likely to be open and municipal services are less well funded.
All of that is true, and makes perfect sense. It all depends on where you live, of course.
Not everyone lives in densely packed urban areas.
That's hilarious. I currently live where I can see like 3 of my neighbors.
And? I can see several neighbors' residences. We barely get cell signal half the time, and the only Internet currently is dodgy WiFi, which also regularly goes wonky. A lot of times we can walk into nearby establishments and leave empty -handed, because Internet is down and we don't have cash enough in have to make our purchases.
Sounds like you need to move away from the actual sticks.
I call where I am country'ish because while I have only a handful of neighbors, we have gigabit down from spectrum, damn near gig over 5g, etc.
🤨
There's literally like four places with free wifi in my entire town. Most of the restaurants don't have it, and we only have two hotels.. neither of which has properly free wifi- you have to get a room to use it.
If you want to get technical, my town (really a village) has zero free wifi networks. It's the larger city to my south that has all of the restaurants, hotels, retail, etc with free wifi.
If you need to send SMS commercially they're still generally priced at $0.03 each. I just had to deal with that because some users will apparently only turn on MFA if they can get the codes by txt.
OP didn't clarify personal versus business. I'm aware of how much businesses get ripped off, I've looked into using the short codes for promoting my own business and shit is not cheap.
I considered setting up a raspberry pi with a 4g hat because of that.
In the wild west days of the internet we used to connect consumer CDMA phones straight to our servers. You'd walk around your COLO and peek in racks of crazy expensive, rack mounted hardware with the world's cheapest flip phone sitting on top.
The telcos caught wind and started terminating accounts. It was a great way to have a server tell you it fell off the network.
I spend about £15 per year on my phone. No way that could be beaten with a contract. I'm still annoyed at how expensive it is though
Where did I say anything about a contract? I spend $1800/year for 4 lines, 3 personal and 1 work line. In the USA at least, prepaid beats postpaid/contract every day of the year. Every time I price moving all 4 lines over to postpaid to get easier access to esims, a little leeway on payment, etc, I always end up staying with prepaid.
I assumed it was the same thing. In the UK, all our phones are prepaid. You can either get a contract for a set monthly amount, or you buy credit which you spend over time (which presumably is what you mean by prepaid).
While we're on the subject, is it true that you have to pay to receive calls in the US?
I'm not certain what you're asking. Are you asking if someone can call you and make you pay for it? Not that I've ever seen. With the exception of jails/prisons- inmates can collect call you. I imagine it's a thing in other contexts, but not that I've ever experienced.
Generally, ime pretty much everyone has unlimited calls and texts these days. It's pretty dirt cheap. Data is much more expensive and limited. Even "unlimited" data plans are only technically so- after some arbitrary but generally high amount of data they'll throttle the absolute hell out of you.
I've got this weird half-remembered thought in my head that you don't have a separate set of phone numbers for mobile / cell vs landline (in the UK, all mobile numbers start 07... ). Therefore you don't know who you're calling so it wouldn't be possible to charge extra when calling a cell phone, therefore the owner of the cell phone has to pay that extra amount.
Like I said, it's just a vague half-memory and I could have completely made it up. That's why I'm asking