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29 Dec 08

Digital Domain - What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...28digi.html - Preview

text messaging

about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year
profit margins
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- He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four.
- text messaging costs and pricing
- All four of the major carriers decided during the last three years to increase the pay-per-use price for messages to 20 cents from 10 cents
- pricing plans
- price-fixing
- CTIA — the Wireless Association, a trade group based in Washington
- A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential.
- Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.
- That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.