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Comment by colinplamondon | Hacker News Reader

More like it's an international price-fixing scam waiting to get slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit by the FCC under President Obama.

I'd be absolutely shocked if this continues until 2013.

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I think the cost of SMS messages are a large part of their value. You can send a message to any phone yet you don't see SMS spam.

You can send a message to any phone yet you don't see SMS spam.

I definitely get SMS spam. I think part of the profit model on SMS spam is that they are high-cost, opt-in messages (that you didn't sign up for). The senders are using a rebate style model, hoping you won't expend the effort of getting your carrier to remove the charges.

And then of course I get random, wrong number SMSs, which still cost me.

You get charged for incoming SMSs?

I have unlimited free incoming sms messages. The only time you get charged is if you're on some pay as you go plans with certain carriers.

In the US at least, all of the major wireless providers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint) charge you for receiving SMS messages (see http://joshmoles.com/2008/04/09/incoming-sms-should-be-free/ ). The only exception I can think of is if you are paying for a certain number of text messages through your plan (i.e. AT&T offers 200, 1500, and unlimited texting plans) - incoming messages are deducted from this number, though.

Wow, then I can understand Americans are keen on getting rid of SMS. Imagine being charged for every email you receive. That would screw up by budget at least.

I even get a little mad when my friends send me SMS :) You can imagine how pissed off you'd be when you receive spam. My wife once received the same spammy message about 5 days in a row. I didn't think too much of it until we got the bill and each one of those was something like $2.99 a piece from some "premium SMS" service that she had not signed up for.

That is extremely stupid, to me anyways. The argument posed when other carriers tried to do it here is that the company was double charging for the service - which stopped a lot of carriers from even attempting to implement the incoming charge.

Another thing that's crazy is the cost of your txting plans/packages. My mom and sister are on $25 plans here and get unlimited txting included for free.

Those Americans.. A carrier that charged for any incoming traffic (SMS, voice, etc) in Germany would see its customers flee in droves.

in Italy, you sometimes get credit added to your account per SMS received ! :)

In Germany, too.

We'd flee if there were anywhere to flee to. The charges are ridiculous, but all the carriers just tout all-you-can-text plans for $10/mo and people buy those.

Not if ever carrier did the same, which is the case in the US of course.

My understanding is that alot of the spam you get is spammers sending email to <phonenumber>@<carrier>.com. They don't pay a penny.

I have seen SMS spam (though it's rare), and I think it's criminal that carriers can get away with charging the receiver for unsolicited SMS messages. There needs to be a way to opt out of these.

I'd be willing to accept free messaging in return for only allowing incoming messages from numbers saved in my phone (or previously sent to, so texting a shortcode for info wouldn't require adding it to the phonebook first).

I agree with you on this. The fact that sending a message costs strictly more than 0 reduces noise of the communication channel. I think you can achieve the noise reduction with 1 or 2 cents per message, the rest is profit to telecom carriers.

Carriers love spams and scams. I get spam all the time from recruiters and promotions. Carriers also allow high cost unverified opt-in tricks to scam people and get a huge slice (I've read around 50%.) These are in the top reported consumer complaints every year in many countries.

At least one Senator (Herb Kohl D-WI), is actively looking into this. He's got some pull as the chair of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/business/28digi.html

In what way is it a price fixing scam??? In the same way your electricity supply is a price fixing scam?

Please don't believe the idiotic articles claiming that sending an SMS costs the mobile companies nothing...

If all the phone carriers get together and say, "Hey Bob -- if you keep the price of your SMS at 10c, I promise to keep the price of SMS at 10c. We agree to not compete on SMS pricing. That way we can make lots of moola on something that costs both of us nothing."

That's collusion and it's illegal. They just watch each other. If verizon doesn't move, Sprint doesn't either. That's also the way airlines match prices.

that's why they raised it from 10 to 20 cents over the last few years

The base station (edge) and network-infrastructure (backhaul) equipment probably can't be purchased without SMS functionality at this point. There's no delivery commitment on SMS/MMS messages and traffic at essentially every site is cyclical. SMS gets delivered in the idle space, therefore the marginal bandwidth cost is literally zero.

That pretty much leaves the SMSC/MMSC (the dedicated hardware that processes messages in the center/edge of the mobile network). Perhaps $0.10/message was justified in 2000 when this stuff was only being used by phone geeks, but I think there's a bit of margin in it these days. :)

Some plans charge 1000 times as much per byte for text as for voice. I would say the difference between zero and non-zero is just noise.

SMS costs the carriers virtually nothing. Not exactly $0 but very close, something like $0.000000000000001.

They do not contribute to variable costs. But in theory the money made from SMS could be used to cross-subsidize calls.

Well, I guess that the fact that sending data through SMS costs four times more per byte than downloading data from the Hubble telescope sort of tells people that they're being screwed.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/303/1046303/sms-cos...

And sure - it costs the operator more than zero to send an SMS, but it's so close to zero that it's hard to tell the numbers apart.

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