kahunaburger

Yes, I know I’m screaming – it’s supposed to be that way! Text messages are one of those things that drive me absolutely nuts. Not the messages themselves, but the fact that the carriers can get away with highway-robbery and nobody seems to complain about it.

An analogy: The US Postal Service just announced a new service that allows you, the sender of a letter, to add a short message to the recipient on the outside of your envelope.
One line of text costs $25 dollars extra. You can purchase a bulk-subscription, which allows you to send 100 such messages a month for as little as $250.
As the recipient of such a message, you would be charged an extra $12.50 per message (whether you want that message or not). A subscription, as above, would allow you to receive up to 100 such messages.
If you want to make sure that the service cannot be used for outgoing or incoming mail, you’ll be charged a $10 per month service fee.

If you didn’t say “That’s insane!” while reading the above paragraph, then, congratulations, you are the poster-child of a new-era, brain-washed, mobile user; Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Alltel are very happy with you and would like to send you this free ringtone as a gift (additional charges may apply).

Text (SMS) messages are one of the biggest rip-offs ever created. In fact, plain text messages (as opposed to picture messages) don’t cost your provider a single cent (or a fraction thereof). Your mobile phone is in constant communication with nearby cell-towers. That communication is used to figure out where the strongest signal is coming or whether there’s data that needs to be exchanged with your phone. That communication happens regardless of whether there is something to talk about or not.

When you send or receive a text-mesages, the data that makes up the text message is broken into smaller pieces and is added to that constant communication without increasing the size of the individual packets. And that means that a carrier does not have to do anything “extra” to transport messages back and forth.

I actually called Verizon and asked them to disable all incoming/outgoing messages to/from my phone. Believe it or not, they asked me to sign up for a “parental controls service” that allows me to do that and more for $4.99/month extra.

What to do instead? Most phones that can send/receive text messages also have some sort of Internet access. Use email instead. Chances are that basic data-access (which is used for emails) is still a heck of a lot cheaper than text messaging. If you have already data access and want to send/receive text messages outside of your carrier, you may also be able to use Google Voice’s free SMS sub-system.

Whatever you do, just don’t let the carriers get away with those outrageous charges for a few LOLs …

PS: photo courtesy of Kenby10 on flickr.