The Rising Cost of Texting

Good thing I still have my grandfathered free unlimited text messaging!

 

Wow $6,000 per song. That means my entire MP3 collection is worth over $15,000,000!

I don't even use texting, because IMO, its a waste of time & money.
I'd rather talk 10,000 minutes per month like I already do.

 

see im the exact opposite of you.....i love beig able to have multiple conversations at a time......but i still manage to talk 1000 minutes next to my 6000 texts

 

I love my $9.99 Unlimited Family Texting Package from T-Mobile (covers up to 5 lines)!

 

$9.99 family texting???

 

It takes me over 200 seconds to type 160 characters, what a waste of time texting is for me, lol.

Anyway, I think coin-operated pay phones are a way better deal than pay-per use texting.

Only 25 cents for a whole minute! Versus 20 cents for the equivilent of 10 seconds (which is 160 characters).

 

And I thought I was doing good with my $20 unlimited family texting, $9.99 is awesome!

These higher texting rates got the best of my mom's boyfriend. He finally looked at his newest bill as it was really high, he had no texting plan when he thought he did.

 

I guess if I used text messaging the increase would bother me. On the other hand I do drive, 17.35 gallons of regular set me back $67.13. I paid the bargain basement price of $3.87 a gallon. What a deal!

 

The rising price of text messages is a simple supply-and-demand issue. At the rate people have been SMS-ing the last few years, the limited supply of SMS's will soon be depleated. Some say we have allready used up half of the worlds supply of SMS, and that we have to look into alternative ways of communication, like MMS or e-mails. In the short term, companies like Nortel and Ericsson have comitted to increasing the output of SMS, but it will not really reduce the current costs and is not a long term solution. We must explore alternative means of communication for future generations to survive.

 

Sounds like something I'd say! LOL :lmao:

I've already found an alternative, talking on the phone so much

 

Raising SMS rates is just a way to generate revenue, it either forces you to pay outrageous overage or to accept the fact that you need to add a monthly recurring charge to your acct for a feature. Either way the company wins, but since I am with the company I am cool with this. Besides as an employee my plan cost me 9.99 and I get free data and unlimited messaging by the way the 9.99 fam messaging rate mentioned earlier for the tmobile customer that is a grandfathered feature, current rate is 19.95 for family plan customers, still a great deal.

 

Ok, call me dumb, but I'm not getting the point here. Sure enough the per unit price of a text SMS is 20Cents per message, if you have no SMS plan.

But the price per message in a Text Plan has dropped significantly over the years. ATT plans are:

200 messages for $5.... 2.5 cents per message
1500 messages for $15..... 1 cent per message
Unlimited for $20... cheaper than dirt per message

And the unlimited family SMS plan $30 for a family of 4 (for example).... $7.5 per person and again cheaper than dirt. But say daughter Sally uses 1500, then that is equivalent to 1/2 cent per message.

Years ago, Text plans were much more per message than now. In fact I think an unlimited text plan was not even available. I would have to look it up from an old post of mine, but a similar calculation today would say if you send/receive more than 20 messages a month, get the $5 plan. I think years ago, the break even point was about the same. It's a pretty low threshold.

But here is an idea...Rollover for SMS's !!

 

Just do what I do... Why pay for text when I have unlimited email/internet and M2M calling on the phone? Pretty much I just call someone. If I MUST send some type written message I will send an email from the phone. All of my friends know to either call or email me, and only text when there is no other option. I usually spend under $1/mo for texting on all of my lines.

-Jay

 

Wirelessly posted (Walkguru's: Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.1.11328/534; U; en))

thats why i got sero.

 

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 es70)

I still have my old AT&T Wireless plan, which includes unlimited free incoming text messages. Since I still have an unlimited data plan, I send e-mail to the SMS e-mail address. It works for me. I find that receiving text messages is much less disruptive than phone calls if I'm at work, especially during meetings.

 

I send email to folks on AT&T and Verizon, since I know their email addresses. I mostly text folks on MetroPCS directly since I don't know their address, so I have to have a small messaging plan for them. To keep costs down, I have data and messaging blocked on my other lines. I remember when Verizon had different rates for SMS: 0.10 to send and 0.02 to receive. The only thing that didn't change was the pay per use MMS messaging... I think it was a quarter back then also. At least mms messaging is included in the message plans!

 

Have you tried 10digitmobilenumber@mymetropcs.com or 10digitmobilenumber@metropcs.sms.us ?

 

I'll have to try those! I didn't know about these! I will have to try them out. Thank You!

 

Prepaid "Pay As You Go" SMS packages at at&t have rollover. (as long as you renew the package prior to it's expiration date)

Of course the draw back is the lack of roaming partner coverage and incessant balance notification messages - even for no balance change transactions .

 

Give texting more time. As with all things someone will break, but the question is Who ? Will it be Sprint, Alltel, T-Mobile, AT&T, Southern Linc, Us Cellular, Cellular South, Uniell, or Verizon ? How about the two Sattelite phone companies currently in the USA, like Globalstar & Irridium ? Who Know's but in time we will all find out...... If any....

 

True, all the carriers have had different SMS/MMS plans over the years. But I and we should compare apples to apples. I can only judge Cingular and now at&t.

Cingular never had a $2.99 unlimited plan. I think it was 100 or maybe 200 messages. The old ATT had free incoming SMS, but hey, they went broke, so Cingular bought them!! But we are still paying for those old blue ATT plans.

In 2005, Cingular's best offer was 2500 SMS for $19.95. Just a wee bit better than the 1500 for $15.00 today ( $0.008 vs $0.01 per message). Back then the WA forums talked about how Cingular's policy was such that they would never offer unlimited SMS.

I did have a Cingular plan for a 1000 SMS and unlimited MMS. Great deal, but back then people had problems sending MMS to other carriers.

Which, BTW, is a good point. Even in today's WA recent posts, users are STILL complaining that they are having problems sending SMS between some carriers. Let alone to an overseas carrier. Also the phone number to send an SMS say to Europe is huge to type in.

So I see just using email addresses for texting and photos in the future. A lot more simple, and it would solve the problems of SMS not getting through between different carriers. A lot easier to remember an email address than a phone number, esp. international. Plus one is not limited to 160 characters or small sized photos, lower than what today's phones can do.

So today getting an unlimited data plan for $15, and using email instead of SMS probably is the wave of the future. But the would need to give everybody push mail, like the BB's

 

AT&T Wireless didn't go broke. While the botched billing system upgrade may have hurt them, they didn't necessarily have to sell. If they chose not to sell, it definitely would have been an uphill battle to recover from it. In the end, they chose the easy way out (unlike Sprint) and ended up selling to Cingular at a premium.

 

I will continue to use SMS. For me, it is faster (a PDA phone helps ) than a phone call, saves on your minutes (especially if your call isn't M2M or during the N&W time), and in certain instances it is the only means of communication [especially if you are in a weak coverage area or in an area where voice doesn't work (Hurricane Wilma that hit my area a few years ago comes to mind since voice didn't work and SMS was the only thing working on a cell phone)].