I was hoping to read that "kills the SMS market" meant finally one of the carriers destroyed the market in the sense that it was now free and all other carriers would have to follow suit. :(
If only in killing it they would inadvertently spur the development of an alternative... It seems to me that there are almost enough smart phones on the market that an alternative (free) messaging protocol could get a foothold, and if it gained traction there the mobile service providers could no longer ignore demand for cost-free messaging.
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.
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 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.
Verizon has backtracked on the issue. It was just a "proposal" for discussion. Sure...
Here's the latest directly from the horse's mouth:
"As Verizon Wireless continues to review the competitive marketplace, we constantly work to provide additional value to our customers, employees and other stakeholders.
We are currently assessing how to best address the changing messaging marketplace, and are communicating with messaging aggregators, our valued content partners, our technology business partners and, importantly, our friends in the non-profit and public policy arenas.
To that end, we recently notified text messaging aggregators - those for-profit companies that provide services to content providers to aggregate and bill for their text messaging programs - that we are exploring ways to offset significantly increased costs for delivering billions upon billions of text messages each month.
Specific information in one proposal, which would impose a small per-message fee on for-profit content aggregators for commercial messages, has been mistakenly characterized as a final decision to implement. We don’t envision this type of change to in any way affect non-profit organizations or political and advocacy organizations.
We have not increased the per-message cost to aggregators since our messaging service began in 2003, and we have never envisioned a cost to consumers or content companies, but rather on content aggregators themselves. That draft was intended to stimulate internal business discussions and in no way should have been been released to the public and represented as a final document.
At Verizon Wireless, we strive to provide our messaging customers with maximum value, and work to implement business decisions that encourage the use of messaging between individuals and organizations in both the marketplace of ideas and the commercial marketplace, and we will continue to strongly encourage the use of our services by charitable organizations as they perform their good works."
Kind of an exaggerated headline. They might be killing the market for bulk messaging by businesses to users, but not the whole SMS market... the majority of which is user-to-user and already more expensive than 4 cents per SMS.
I wonder if this affects texts sent via an email->SMS gateway. I'm working on a small project that uses SMS, but we're just emailing them to number@smsgateway.com.
