Nadine Touzet's List: telecom

• co-location providers, also known as carrier hotels or Internet peering points

• carriers
• price-fixing
• text message rates
• pay-per-use price for messages
• class action lawsuits filed against the carriers
• costs-per-message
• text messaging bundles
• not only are text messages very small amounts of data, but they have their own control channel in the wireless network — and this channel is being used by the carriers in their operations whether a text is being sent or not
• Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume. It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million
• unlimited plans

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• about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year
• profit margins
• 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.

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• Nation's Switch To Digital TV
• transition to digital television
• TV viewers
• converter boxes
• rabbit ear
• rooftop antennas
• airing analog signals
• digital-only broadcasts
• coupons to help offset the price
• government-mandated switch to digital television
• public safety agencies
• to dig deeper into their own pockets

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