More Thoughts on Digital Pricing

just for the record, i am not alone in my thoughts on the ridiculous pricing of some elements of cell phone plans. case in point, this piece from the new york times (and check this out on the true price of sending an SMS):

TEXT-MESSAGING FEES Why has the price of a text message gone to 20 cents, from 10, in two years? There was no big technology shift. There was no spike in the cost of electrons.

And speaking of anticompetitive: Isn’t it a little fishy that all four big United States carriers raised their text-message fees at essentially the same time?

Furthermore, why do text messages get special premium treatment at all? Why are e-mail messages (which require much more data) included with basic Internet service, but text messages require either a per-message fee or a separate package?

The carriers can’t possibly argue that transmitting text-message data costs them that much money. One blogger (http://bit.ly/gHkES) calculated that the data in a text message costs you about 61 million times as much as the same message sent by e-mail.

Give or take.

the rest is worth a read as well. the article also touches on another personal crusade of mine, those annoying messages when you leave a voicemail, instructing you to press 5 to leave a numeric page or to hang up when you are done. i have always thought those messages were scams to increase the amount of time you spend on the line in the hopes that you will increase you minutes used, hopefully to the point where you go over your usage and have to pay extra money. clever. but there is something that can be done with the new campaign "take back the beep".

send a complaint to your carrier. lets see if we can't stop this farce.