According to Sympatico Tech News, we are being ripped off to send text messages!

"Some people think it's not a big deal," Srinivasan Keshav told CBC Radio's The Current Thursday. "But others might think that the markup of 5,000 per cent is a bit excessive."

Two days earlier, Keshav testified as much to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Anti-Trust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, which was examining text messaging rates and competition among wireless carriers.

According to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, which represents the cellphone industry, Canadians send 77 million text messages a day. Like carriers in the U.S., most Canadian wireless providers charge 15 cents for each text message for customers who don't have a text messaging plan. However, most wireless users do have a text messaging plan that offers cheaper rates, Keshav said.

Keshav, who holds a Canada Research Chair in tetherless computing and has studied cellphone networks for the past five years, was asked by the U.S. Senate committee to:

- Estimate the cost to the carriers of delivering a text message.

- Give his opinion about whether recent increases in the price of text messages for customers without a text messaging plan were justified.

Keshav estimated that the cost of carrying the text message, based on the network equipment required and the billing costs, was "very unlikely" to exceed a third of a cent.

He told the committee he did not think price increase were justified, as they would only be reasonable if they were intended to decrease network congestion. Such congestion is unlikely being caused by text messages, given the number of messages transmitted compared to the number of available cell towers, he said.

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Posted at 09:43PM Jun 18, 2009 by Kevin P McAuliffe in Produce  |  Comments[0]