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Comment by quaquaqua1 | Hacker News Reader

I will be extremely displeased if they do. It is a basically free way to communicate silently and asynchronously with virtually any phone in a given area.

The same cannot always be said for other messaging apps. Sure, you can communicate globally with Telegram and Whatsapp, but they require a slightly more stable connection and of course they use data which has a non-zero cost.

I work in a building that has horrible, horrible reception. The only thing making it out of those walls is text messages. Whatsapp even will rarely work, and Hangouts messages? Forget about it. It has to ping a server 17 times before sending a message, seemingly.

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SMS is far from "free". It's often bundled into a package consumers buy, so "included" perhaps, but the actual data costs for SMS traffic are insanely higher than data connection traffic.

SMS is carried in the status/beacon messages that the phone and tower periodically exchange. This is why there is a character limit. Bandwidth cost is zero.

Right; it's free on a technical level. Many, many carriers charge for it anyway, certainly in the US, though I don't know what the situation is abroad.

I think a better argument for the standard is simply that it's built into the protocol, and therefore unlikely to vanish anytime soon. Can't say the same for the trendy app of the week.

Well,telcos aren't a charity either, consider yourself paying regular service fees, enabling employees to keep their jobs, or even just using that money for the Mobile Data you use.

I have a cheap prepaid, still using SMS every day because I know I have unlimited use of it, to several countries even. Data is where they make their money

Eh, SMS, the very short text protocol is insanely cheap for the networks. MMS does eat a lot more data though.

SMS and MMS are so cheap I wouldn't be surprised if the total operating cost is dominated by side things like extra staff at customer service centers etc.

But this isn't a question about how much SMS costs the carrier, it's how much they charge their customers for it. Retail price is often completely divorced from the actual cost of the goods and services provided.

SMS is basically free to operate, it's in the networking equipment you need to install and run to provide cellular service anyway. Similarly telcos no longer meter your SMS usage, basically the only thing they charge for and cap is data.

As someone else pointed out, it's SMS across borders that's ridicules. There is no reason why that should cost €0.5 per SMS.

SMS is not as cheap as most people imply.

Sure, the total bitrate of sms messages is low, but the software and services are all legacy, require people with special skills to setup, and have quite high license fees to keep running.

Set up your own SMSC and tell us how easy it was...?

The bitrate is a huge deal. High costs on the backend are a legitimate concern, but ultimately we've got a finite number of base stations and some areas simply will not get base stations, ever. SMS is probably the only protocol that can extend any amount of coverage into these remote areas where message delivery can be a matter of life or death.

And some of these areas aren't even that remote, just unintentionally RF shielded.

I'd wager no more difficult than operating the mobile network on which it runs in the first place.

When people call it cheap, they are likely referring to the marginal cost being near zero. This makes sense as telecom carries a huge overhead to operate, SMS or no.

SMS requires looking up where the receiver is and sending around the message if he moves before it is received. It doesn’t cost much but it definitely isn’t free.

In France you can have unlimited SMS + 2 hours of call per month for 2€. So it's very close to "free". Texting is free towards all EU, USA and a bunch of other countries around the world.

> course they use data which has a non-zero cost.

It's odd that you keep mentioning cost. Text messages are often metered at some ludicrous rate (or sold at a similarly ludicrous unlimited monthly addition).

> virtually any phone in a given area.

From what I understand, outside of the US, text messages are not quite as reliable. I don't know if that's cause or effect of the fact that outside of the US nearly everyone uses WhatsApp or WeChat.

Text messages are ubiquitous here in the UK, and normally work fine. For better or worse, many online systems now rely on them for 2FA as well.

As another data point, the choice of personal mobile plans in the UK is now almost entirely dominated by how much data allowance you want. Apart from some budget plans for people or devices that don't need significant amounts of data at all, the number of minutes of calling time or SMS messages you send is unlikely to be a significant factor in the plan you choose or the price you pay any more, being practically unlimited in most cases.

Not to foreign numbers, though

They're also very reliable in Germany.

What are the countries where they're unreliable?

Text messages on some networks in the UK sometimes have a 10-15 minute delay at busy times. Even on good days, there is usually a 10 second or so delay.

That makes them impractical for realtime chat, and even makes 'verification codes' a pain.

I have a UK number and the amount of times SMS verification codes fail to appear is huge. There are companies specifically selling services for this that can’t even send a SMS to a first world phone number. I haven’t used it for personal communication for years but I do not remember it being particularly reliable when I did. SMS from my perspective is absolute rubbish.

Perhaps it varies by network, mine have seemed instant for years (with O2 then Tesco Mobile).

It’s just reliable compared to internet connectivity which is terrible in Germany. Poorly connected Edge all around.

Google wants carriers to drop SMS for RCS, a new text messaging standard. They aren’t pushing for the elimination of text messages.

I'm sure that SMS will remain as a fallback mode for many years to come.

No, but they are pushing yet another standard that's insecure by default because their entire business model is based on spying on end users.

How does RCS help Google "spy on users" any more than SMS?

We're talking about the REPLACEMENT for SMS. SMS was developed in a time when encryption and security were barely even an afterthought. if we're designing the messaging standard for the next decade+, why on earth would we want something that's equally insecure?

Imagine if SSH didn't exist and we were all still using telnet in 2019. If Google were backing a replacment that lacked even basic encryption, would you be OK with that, or would you point out it's absolutely ridiculous? Because that's what we're talking about here...

Go ahead, find out how fast you get thrown in national security prison if you try and encrypt SMS as a baseline ;)

Well, the creators of WhatsApp and iMessage and Signal are not in prison..

"n June 2019, Google announced that it would begin to deploy RCS on an opt-in basis via the Messages app, with an RCS-compliant service hosted by Google rather than the user's carrier. "

So, SMS does not go through google. RCS goes through google.

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