Announcing Free Incoming SMS For All
plivo.com
plivo.com
There are a lot of things wrong with India but the telecom industry here(at least up to around 2010) should be a showcase for regulation done right. Dirt cheap sms rates(around .001 usd), 3G rates, fixed monthly subscription charge for roaming, tower-sharing (multiple mobile operators share a cellular tower), number-porting, second-pulse billing,and around 10-11 operators to choose from.
Sure, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India probably squeezed a little to hard and the 2G and 3G corruption scandals that followed reversed some of those trends to an extent; But the situation is still much better than in the US.
It is also a market where dual SIM phones are useful. Carriers are running promotions all the time, so consumers pick which SIM is offering the better deal on a call by call basis.
Incoming call charges do make sense in the US and aren't as evil as everyone believes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8075829
I understand the justification of paying for incoming calls, since they don't have separate prefix codes for mobile (which means that the caller does not know they're calling a mobile, and therefore you cannot put the charge on the caller), but incoming SMS, where you don't even get a choice over whether you want to receive it? "Peculiar" is putting that very nicely...
- 250 minutes Calling
- Unlimited texts
- Unlimited Internet (no tethering, or £10 w/1 GB and tethering)
So Americas get massively screwed on their wireless services. The fact that tons of people on here are praising the insanely expensive "Unlimited" texting offers is just bonkers.
For the cost of just your unlimited texting in the US you can pay your entire monthly cellphone bill in the UK, consider that. And due to tax, surcharges, etc the $20/month is actually closer to $30/month.
unlimited internet (throttled at 2.5gig/month), unlimited text, unlimited minutes. $45/month = £26. Not perfect, but livable.
The routing inbound calls you typically have to pay, but the costs are usually so negligible, most VoIP/landline provides include them for free with the overall subscription.
Cell phones are a different story all together.
Also most plans now have unlimited texts (to send or receive). I only paid for texts when I was on the cheapest possible pay-as-you-go plan.
* With AT&TFree ay? So you can pay them $0/month and send/receive text messages? No? It is actually over $100/month? Is that "free?"
The next day at school one of us got called into the office. The girl's parents had hired a private investigator to find out who sent the texts. My friend denied everything and there was no real evidence so no one got caught (turns out these types of shenanigans are NOT okay, and illegal).
We had racked up her phone bill into over-usage rates and I'm not sure if the carrier dropped the charges we had produced or whether her parents had to pay. I can't imagine that night's incoming text cost being below $200.
But now I believe most teenage girls in the US have unlimited texting.
It is nice to be able to iMessage w/other iPhone users.
My wife is on a pay as you go (prepaid) plan and each SMS counts as a minute.
Many people still "pay" for SMS. When we had outrageous per SMS charges (yes, also for incoming messages), carriers started to offer "bulk" -- e.g. 1000 messages per billing cycle -- plans and then "ulimited" SMS plans, typically for $30, $20, eventually $10 / month extra.
Now, more an more plans included "unlimited SMS". Not all, though, and total monthly bills that include such "unlimited SMS" vary widely. One also has to remain aware / beware of international SMS messages, where one's plan may still charge exorbitant per message fees.
P.S. Back in the days of high charges, just be so lucky as to end up on the receiving end of messages from some romantic interest who thinks your phone number is their interest's number. Obnoxious, perhaps crass messages, and to boot you're paying for the "privilege" of receiving them. (Fortunately, the carrier's limited blocking options sufficed to squelch those when he wouldn't believe I wasn't her.)
In short it is to with termination rates, area codes, and how people in the rest of the world get screwed but don't realise it.
Plus doesn't the US have hidden rates too? If I call someone on a landline and they're in the same city I pay less than if I call someone two cities over even though the two MIGHT have the same exact area code ("long distance").
> Cellular was easily rolled out without disruption. An existing number could switch to cellular and no one else would have to know or care. If you were a business (eg a plumber) you didn't have to worry about people calling you fretting over getting charged more for the call than your competitors.
> Numbers are easily portable. You can switch any number to use cellular. Countries using the other scheme can have portability but usually it is limited to cellular area codes only.
That's a non-issue. Call forwarding exists outside the US too(!). You can buy generic numbers, or a landline that forwards to your cellphone (or rings at both).
But ultimately your entire argument is defeated by one fact: In the US when a telemarketer calls you YOU pay for the pleasure. You're literally paying for people to spam or hassle you.
That's why so many free conference call places were in Iowa. They were exploiting the 5 cent tariffs Iowa had published in combination with people expecting all of the US to cost the same. Big carriers stopped terminating the calls, but the FCC slapped them back and insisted they had to terminate such calls.
Landline to landline, yes. This got me when we moved back to Georgia 14 years ago. Friends in the 229 area code that lived 50 miles away in one direction, local, 50 miles in another, long distance.
However, for cellular (now) you pay by minutes, and, as far as I can tell, unless you're hitting 900 numbers or similar, a minute is a minute, local or long distance. I have never had my own landline so I don't know the current status there, and most people I know with one only use it for security systems (so they can get away with the cheapest $10 or $20/month plan with no long distance).
The UK is also complicated - eg if a number starts with 08.
There aren't hidden rates. You are applying a British mentality - that the area code defines an area. In the US it is the exchange numbers (next 3 digits after the area code). It used to be normal to not dial area codes. I got bitten by this exact issue the first time I made a "local" call from a hotel, arguing with the front desk that a call to the same area code is by definition the same (local) area.
There are actually 3 distances - local, local toll, and long distance. You can actually have a different carrier for each one! For example local is a few miles around, local toll would be 20-100 miles away, and long distance after that. (Americans like things complicated.) When I had a land line it was about 5 times as much to call San Francisco (~60 miles away) than New York (~2,000 miles away)!
Local calls are included with your service price, also called "free" by people. However the base service price was about four times what I paid in the UK. There was a wonderful paper I saw years ago and haven't been able to find again, where they showed that Americans preferred fixed pricing - ie you know in advance what your bill will be - versus a pay as you go model. Not only that they are willing to pay more for the certainty of those future bills.
The issue you are thinking of is that the termination rates in some rural areas are very high in order to subsidise providing the service there. Consequently various "free" conference calls and similar services are sourced out of those areas. The rural telco then shares the revenue. The caller's telco ends up paying for the increased rates - it isn't visible to the caller. This is why there is some weasel language in various phone contracts saying they won't connect you to those numbers/services.
Call forwarding isn't a perfect solution. It still requires the cooperation of two companies - the one with the number, and the one where the number is forwarded to.
The argument isn't defeated as such - rather the US had no option than to go the way it did. Call prices are very cheap when adding together what the caller and recipient pay, compared to the rest of the world where some of it is hidden and regulators have stepped in setting rates rather than there being meaningful competition.
Telemarketers aren't allowed to call cell phones. Obviously that won't just stop them, but since they are actually trying to sell something and they need to contact a reasonable volume of people to have success, it is a lot easier for them to be detected and blocked by the carriers. I get about one telemarketer call a year. I could also contact my carrier and they would remove charges for telemarketing calls.
The majority of cellular and landline plans now are unlimited voice calls in any direction, so most of the earlier issues aren't present any more.
How does that work from the caller's point of view in caller-pays systems? Does the caller pay the landline rate (because he called a landline), and then the owner of the landline pays the cellphone rate for the forwarding from the landline to the cellphone?
It all comes down to the system you're used to. I'm used to the US system so it seems "odd" that I pay to make a call in Europe. Then again, with a mobile phone in the States that doesn't have unlimited SMS or voice, I pay to originate the voice or text contact all the same, _and_ the recipient pays, too. Know what numbers plumbers advertise on the side of their vans in Ireland? Mobile numbers, readily identified when starting with 083-089.
Number portability is, simply, what it is. Initially, number portability in the States was only allowed between wireless numbers until years later when WLNP was allowed. Even then, you could only port numbers between carriers with facilities in the same area/local code. It's only been in the past six years or so that nationwide, wireless number porting has been a reliable thing and only really because cellular systems in the States have grown so large with so many regional ratecenter connections. Landline number porting still takes almost two weeks with some carriers, if it even works.
IIRC the US had some version of cell phones before e.g. Europe, so probably kept the same business models. The rest of the world was able to rethink the model and with the benefits of hindsight, created cell-specific phone numbers and were able to charge callers rather than phone owners the extra portion.
Edit: I looked up free - a well known French ISP. Guess what - they have free calls all over the world to landlines, but charge for mobile - http://www.free.fr/adsl/telephone.html
Yes, in every other country, the person making the call has to pay (unless its specifically a free call service).
How does it make sense that someone can call/text you and it costs YOU money?
The supposed "difficulty" in understanding call rates to me sounds like the same "difficulty" that keeps you lot off the metric system.
But sure, keep telling us how the rest of the world is wrong - it doesn't make you look self obsessed at all.
What you are paying for is not the incoming call getting to your carrier, but for your carrier to then connect to your phone using radio (or whatever). Same for outgoing calls. To flip it around, when I call YOUR number, why should it be relevant to me how YOU choose connect to the phone network? Why should I care if you use cell, satellite, machines in the exchange, a piece of string, copper or whatever else comes along in the future?
If the US wanted to use separate area codes for mobile then it could only practically be done by making the area codes longer. This would be a massive disruption. What solution would you propose?
Are you seriously saying that people should understand at least 36 different random unrelated area codes to cost more? And that people who can't do that are inferior and just being difficult? Because in other countries they did things like make mobile area codes always start with 7 - ie only one rule to remember.
As for metric, yes I agree the US is dysfunctional there too. As is Britain which still hasn't adopted it for the roads. But I do have a proposed solution: http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/gplus/i-finally-have-a-soluti...
This is in spite of the fact that in order to get from where we were to begin with - with '01' as the area code for London, for example - to where we are today, peoples' numbers went first through the 071/081 split, then through the 'add 1' 0171/0181 era after phONE day, and then finally moved over to the 0207/0208 codes, as a foundation ultimately for London having an 020 area code.
The US & Canada had far more companies, plus NANPA 3/7 format being hard coded everywhere - forms, computer programs etc. Trying to implement changes to phone number length will make y2k efforts look trivial.
Heck when places started requiring the dialling of area codes because "local" areas especially big cities had more than one, was disruptive enough. That started happening in the mid-nineties.
Given the choice between huge disruption, or termination fees being the same and the costs of connecting between the phone company and the person making/receiving the calls being their business, the latter isn't an unreasonable choice. When I call you, why should it be relevant to me if you are connected to your choice of carrier by a piece of copper, fibre, radio waves or whatever else?
If you're telling me the "greatest country in the world" can't transition to a sensible numbering system because it's "too hard" I will simply point you once again to the various other things Americans are hilariously and depressingly behind the rest of the world on... anything related to measurements, banking, healthcare, politics, comes to mind.
> why should it be relevant to me if you are connected to your choice of carrier by a piece of copper, fibre, radio waves or whatever else
because as someone else in the threaded highlighted, it can be abused (especially in the case of SMS which don't require you to 'pick up' to bill you) to a ridiculous level.
Something being missed is that callers are still charged to reach your phone company at the base rates - that is not free to them. You then pay your phone company extra for how you connect to them. Abuse is a red herring. When I go to other countries and get a local SIM I get inundated with SMS, which doesn't cost money but sure does cost a huge annoyance. SMS spam is very rare in the US, with the carriers cooperating to stamp it out and always refunding people for any.
The only sms "spam" I have seen.. I think ever, having had a mobile phone in Australia for ~13 years and now Thailand for about 2 years, is messages from the network operator (and its sister companies), here in Thailand. In Australia I don't remember ever getting "spam".
My point was not about "professional" spam, it was about the potential for personal abuse. Someone posted in the thread earlier about racking up $~200 of sms charges against a friend's ex girlfriend.
Try India sometime for SMS spam.
You mean ado, which is an English word that means "difficulties, trouble, delay"; adieu is a French word for "goodbye".
I used Google Voice via Talkatone as well, but they offer their own VoIP solution now that the 3rd party GV API is discontinued.
In fact, it's a bit surprising Twilio's still able to offer such things. They routinely violate the rules that apply to the rest of us in the industry. Usually you've got to keep a 1:3 in:out ratio per number. Not sure what position Plivo's in. In light of the ratio requirements, maybe free inbound SMS is a way to help out on that.
The marginal cost per message is essentially free. The costs of building, operating and maintaining telco infrastructure are unfortunately not.
Twilio is $0.0075 (.75 cents) per message, Plivo is $0.0065 (.65 cents) per message
...and I see many rate centers at .45 cents in Plivo
Twilio $0.0075 Plivo 0.65¢
Notice the unit of account. Twilio absurdly uses $ while Plivo more sensibly uses ¢, I can't think of any other reason for this than to make it difficult to compare prices and encourage customers to fall into the trap you just did.
Prices normalised:
Twilio 0.75¢ Plivo 0.65¢
Really?
When I'm setting a budget, it's going to be in dollars. If I'm getting prices in cents, I have to remember to convert, or I'm going to make the same mistake your parent comment did.
The currency is dollars, not cents. Most prices are set in dollars, not cents. Most transactions are performed in dollars, not cents. Budgeting is done in dollars, not cents.
Save trouble and use the same units everybody else does.
I'm sure they've A/B tested it, but I've got to believe we're not the only 2 people to ever make that mistake and bounce from the site thinking, "what are they crazy?"
And this example is vastly different then the "Hey look at the cool thing I made! p.s. I am selling it too."