AT&T kills $10 texting plan, leaves only pricey unlimited texting

[Aristotle]

Is there any end to the mobile companies' greed when it comes to SMS?

AT&T kills $10 texting plan, leaves only pricey unlimited texting

Unlimited texting should be $1 a month at the most. It costs them almost nothing.

[Jyn]

No kidding. I'm currently paying $20/mo for unlimited texting. That is on top of $30/mo for unlimited data usage. Complete BS. If anything, the unlimited texting should be included in the unlimited data usage, no? End result is $100/mo phone bill and that is just ridiculous. Honestly, I don't know why I pay it.

[Onalie]

Wow this news makes me very glad I left AT&T behind last year. Are they grandfathering people in who already had it? I know with verizon when they ditched the 30$ unlimited data those of us with it already wont lose it unless we dumb down our phones or if you get a whole new line. It is ridiculous that they want so much money for texts, I think honestly they are pissed that most of us text now instead of voice calls

[Calan]

I've bene paying for the unlimited text plan for a few years already anyway. Well worth it for me!

[Sier]

I thought that generally as technology progresses, technological services became cheaper rather than more expensive. Why does AT&T work in the opposite direction? Why also, in this day and age, are they capping bandwidth usage even for unlimited plans? We put a man on the moon and created the first atom bomb. Surely we can make thicker internet pipes.

[Aristotle]

I thought that generally as technology progresses, technological services became cheaper rather than more expensive. Why does AT&T work in the opposite direction? Why also, in this day and age, are they capping bandwidth usage even for unlimited plans? We put a man on the moon and created the first atom bomb. Surely we can make thicker internet pipes.

Because there are basically 2 mobile phone companies right now who dominate the landscape (AT&T and Verizon) and they basically have no desire to really compete with each other.

They understand that they can make larger profits by matching each other's moves and screwing over the consumer.

And the FCC sits by and does jack shit about it.

[Jidoe]

Things aren't much better here. I use apps that allow me to send free texts, but it's a privilege only smartphone holders have. Basically, I feel that charging for texts is something that is soon going to vanish because there are very few people anymore who don't have smartphones or semi-smartphones that enables them to use apps such as whatsapp and not pay anything at all for texts.

[Rosuav]

Things aren't much better here. I use apps that allow me to send free texts, but it's a privilege only smartphone holders have. Basically, I feel that charging for texts is something that is soon going to vanish because there are very few people anymore who don't have smartphones or semi-smartphones that enables them to use apps such as whatsapp and not pay anything at all for texts.

I'm of the opinion that the world needs to move to pure-data systems. You pay for a connection, and you send data across it. Protocols like voice communication and SMS would then simply be built on top of that.

The trouble is, that's really hard to market. It's easy to say "Unlimited free text messages", it's easy to say "X free minutes of talk", and it's apparently quite popular to say "Free calls to other [Provider X] phones", but it's not as cool-sounding to say "Everything to us is frames".

Oh, and that's another thing. It'd probably be fairest to permit people X frames per month, rather than X gigabytes. In terms of congestion, it's a lot easier to handle a 1GB download than 1GB of short messages. But that's even harder to market...

[Aristotle]

I'm of the opinion that the world needs to move to pure-data systems. You pay for a connection, and you send data across it. Protocols like voice communication and SMS would then simply be built on top of that.

That's definitely what we need, and that's basically the mindset behind net neutrality.

The problem, as you already allude to, is that the business of simply providing access to data is not that sexy and not that easy to monetize heavily.

So instead we get these horrible sucky wireless companies that screw us over at every turn, buy off the government to allow insane mergers, and generally use the public airwaves in a manner that is hardly to the benefit of the public.

Wireless in the US is a total mess, and from the sound of it not a whole lot better elsewhere (except maybe in Asia: I read that wireless rules in Asia).

[Rosuav]

The problem, as you already allude to, is that the business of simply providing access to data is not that sexy and not that easy to monetize heavily.

It wouldn't be that hard to monetize - you still sell the fundamental numbers of megabits per second, dollars per month, and percentage reliability - but yes, it's not "sexy". It's SO much easier to boast "Get X free texts per month" or "Get UNLIMITED free texts per month!", but then you have the hidden costs of actually counting everything. I've no idea how much system load it takes to do that kind of segregated metering, but I do know that with a proper iptables setup you can very easily maintain those stats for raw data (both packet count and total size). It's probably not _very_ much, but I can't help wondering if SMS could be closer to real-time if the system wasn't counting and checking credit on the way through.