Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, Al Bochter wrote:
I don't see why the cost to send SMS is around .15 each. What does
the gateway know that I don't know about sending the SMS.
I just think .15 for each SMS send is high. Or am I just over
looking something?
You're missing nothing; The telcos have us by the short & curlys. For
them, it's money for old rope. They probably (in the UK at least) make
many times more money through TXT messages than voice. The "base rate"
here is about 12p a message. 12p for 160 bytes, or a single data
packet over their network - which would be over £700 per MB. There are
now "bolt ons" or additional packages depending on the network you're
with - eg. with my contract I get up to 500 "free" TXTs a month. I
know some people who send dozens a day here. (Especially young people
- I think most 10 year olds now have mobile phones!).
It's scandalous, but no-one challenged it when they first anounced it
because we all thought it was fantastic! The best thing they ever did
was for the 4 networks (in the UK) to agree to pass TXT messages
between each other. That was some 6 or 7 years ago, maybe more, and
that's when it really took off big time in the UK.
I doubt it'll ever change because "that's the way it's always been",
and no-one is going to challenge them in a serious fashion. (And
no-one else can afford to build up a network to make it possible!)
I've not really looked into the TXT sending business via landline in
the UK, but I think it's basically a call to an 09xxx number - which
are premium rate numbers, charging up to £1.50 a minute. Lets hope the
160 byte packet gets sent in less than a minute!
The stats. are amazing too. I looked at wholesale connection last
year for a project. They had rates of up to a million messages a
month. (do the sums and workout how many miuntes there are in a month...)
A quick search shows that in 2004, we in the UK were seding over 20
billion TXT messages a year - Thats 75 million a day. Not bad for a
population of 65 million... Who knows what the rate is today...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/22/uk_text_message_volumes_break/
Ah, that was 2004. Looks like we're almost doing that per month:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/26/uk_sms_record/
3.3 billion texts sent in May 2006...
Gordon
Text messaging is not that big in the US for some reason. Well anyways,
on my T-Mobile phone, I have an unlimited text message package that cost
$15/mo. I am not sure how many constitutes "unlimited" though, I have
not read the small print.
Thanks,
Steve
_______________________________________________
--Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com --
asterisk-users mailing list
To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
