'I, like, so totally agree' to stop texting / Parents wrestling with soaring cellphone bills put curbs on children [Telecom]

Now that is entirely predictable.

As an adult I've had many cell phones, but most have been for business use.

I consider cell phones to be electronic leashes. There are times when it's not that earth shattering if you can't be reached right away.

Actually I liked the SkyTel pager I once had. If a service hiccuped I'd get a text telling me exactly what broke. I didn't have to spend 20 minutes on the phone explaining how to fix it. In most cases in less than a half hour I was at a computer where I could shell in and fix the issue.

I even implemented that at my last job. I had a cell phone with 800 minutes of usage paid for by the job. If I used 100 minutes it was a miracle. Used a lot of texting though since backup alerts, database synchronization errors, etc. all got sent to my phone. I pity whoever has it now.

When my brother-in-law graduated from college in 1973, he went to work for a "high tech" company that sold products all over the world. He came home one day with a pager on his belt, long before they were fashionable.

I said "Hey, you must be an important person!", and he set me right with an answer I've never forgotten: "Bill, the important people *do* the beeping!".

Truer words were never spoken.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)

Given that texting is cheaper (for the phone company) than voice transmission (or ought to be), why don't they make the texting free, and charge more for voice?

Incidentally, our university was recently visited by high school students for the Science Fair. They are immediately obvious, not because they were slightly younger, but because a substantial number of them never hung up their cell phones no matter where they went or what they were doing.

mc wrote in :

For SMS (text over GSM) the real costs are near-zero but the costs are used to regulate usage (there is probably a perfect economical term for this) because very high usage does cost capacity for the provider. If it was really free, someone would write (and spread) IP-over-SMS.

For people who do want to 'text' their friends 200 times a week there are subscriptions available with the first 1000 sms messages per month "free".

Ofcourse, the phone company knows it sold a subscription with that amount of messages and can plan capacity.

The latest generation of the university students I see in my work all have mobile phones, talk on them constantly even when cycling around the city and laptops are becoming quite normal too.

Koos van den Hout

True, all texting goes over the common data channel. But what they're charging you for is texts that go outside that particular carrier. They just blanket to include internals too.

The money games played by cell carriers are amazing. Unlimited plans starting at $100 a month? Are they on drugs? I don't understand how VoIP is now down to about $20 for a YEAR but cell still charges an arm and a leg.

In my opinion you're asking for trouble if you name your offspring after a cheese.

Unless things are different in Rhode Island, your VoIP subscription sits on top of your $40/mo broadband connection, while your cell phone works all by itself.

R's, John

But I've had this argument before, the broadband connecton is 20mbps down and 2mbps up, and only 90kbps is used by the Vonage ATA.

Unless you're claiming that you can get a 90kb junior DSL line for free, I'm not sure what your point is.

Parasitic VoIP only works because you're already paying for some sort of broadband connection. Vonage or Lingo or Voxbone without broadband is worthless. And cell phones also work a lot more places, like in a car.

I'm not arguing that cell phone prices are reasonable (indeed, if you knew how much time I spend on the phone arguing with AT&T to make them honor the price in the contract they signed, you'd know I don't) but comparing the prices to unbundled services isn't useful.

R's, John

This is true, but you're paying for it whether or not you are using it.

--scott

On Fri, 18 Apr 2008, John Levine posted:

Of course, the next argument will be that since free WiFi purportedly is (or will imminently be) "universal", there is no cost for VoIP other than the VoIP charges. I'm sure that your ears have been wearied by that claim as much as mine.

Strange, then, that as time progresses I find it much harder to find free WiFi than in the past.

This perception is confirmed by stumbler: access points are springing up like mushrooms, but the vast majority are WEP or WPA protected. Of the ones which are not WEP/WPA protected, the majority have MAC address filtering. Of the ones which don't have MAC address filtering, the majority block routing to the Internet and first web access redirects you to a login page where you must authenticate yourself and generally make payment arrangements.

When you find a business or residence with open WiFi, you find shortly thereafter that it's been locked down...strange... ;-)

The last bastions of free WiFi seem to be the occasional coffee shop and rural RV parks. And I'm seeing the latter move to fee-based service.

Not long ago, some dingbat was claiming that Tokyo and other Japanese cities had ubiquitous free WiFi. Well, it just so happens that I was in Tokyo last month. What I discovered via stumbler was more access points but an even greater rate of locked down networks. I also found that many Japanese access points used the Japan-only channels. Non-Japanese devices that are sold in Japan (e.g., Mac) would work, but products specifically made for the US or European markets would not.

This is the Achilles' Heel of VoIP; it assumes that Someone Else takes care of the Internet access. Someone Else is increasingly asking to be paid...

-- Mark --