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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Oh well, over here in the UK it's way more expensive than that, and has always been so.

And the SMS services industry in the UK is absolutely thriving! Let me see... there's... SMS ringtones... SMS porn... that's about it I think.

Yeah, ok, fair enough, "kill" is not an exaggeration.

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SMS ringtones and SMS porn are all premium services and naturally are not be affected by a 3 cent transaction fee. This hurts companies that send out free opt in SMS alerts and subsidize them with advertising at the bottom of the message. Up until now, their model was to build up scale which gets them a lower per message fee with the aggregators. However even with large volumes their margins are a few cents at best. This 3 cent "transaction fee" kills them.

Porn in 160 characters?

Back when phones with monochrome displays were common, I did indeed see adverts for pornographic wallpapers, which, as far as I know, were submitted via specially encoded SMS. These days I'm guessing they use MMS.

I guess the Yeah, ok, fair enough, "kill" is not an exaggeration. was not enough of a sarcasm tag.

Next time I'll use </sarcasm>....

I think they're adding $0.03 on top of what they already charge, which is like double what they charged only a few years ago even though there's been little rise in demand. It's already $0.15 on Verizon, it's now $0.18.

However, I remember paying £0.10 per text when I lived in the UK. So 'killing' the market is complete fucking bullshit. Here in Canada, Bell and Telus doubled the cost of SMS overnight by charging for incoming texts. Thankfully the company I got put with, Rogers, when I brought my T-Mobile phone over isn't charging this. So I'm still getting SMS at $0.15 (CAN) and my girlfriend gets charged $0.30 (CAN) per message. Basically they want users to switch from pay-as-you-go to contract (which gets incoming SMS free), instead she's started calling (incidentally putting more demand on the network) and she's going to switch over to Rogers when she buys a new phone.

Ironically, I can't wait until Canada opens up its telecommunication law and allows outside service providers into the country. I'm thinking the Telus operator will be bought out overnight as it's the smallest and is solely a cell phone provider. I also can't wait for competent service, my girlfriends parents have Bell TV and Internet, they've somehow managed to send out Termination-of-Service letters demanding payment 2 days before a bill is due to be paid. This isn't just to us, they've sent it out to hundreds of people asking for payment for a bill not required to be paid at the earliest until 2 days after they're threatening to disconnect.

So I await globalisation of the telecommunication market here, the lowering of prices and the final rise of good customer service.

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