The amount of abuse that the American consumer takes from telecos - Incoming SMS charges, incoming call charges, ridiculous post-paid rates, the colour of your iPhone tied to your carrier contract - beggars belief. You guys are still living under the delusion that the invisible hand of the free market will protect you, but what you don't realize is that the invisible hand is too busy in the pants of AT&T and Verizon to care about you.
There are a lot of things wrong with India but the telecom industry here(at least up to around 2010) should be a showcase for regulation done right. Dirt cheap sms rates(around .001 usd), 3G rates, fixed monthly subscription charge for roaming, tower-sharing (multiple mobile operators share a cellular tower), number-porting, second-pulse billing,and around 10-11 operators to choose from.
Sure, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India probably squeezed a little to hard and the 2G and 3G corruption scandals that followed reversed some of those trends to an extent; But the situation is still much better than in the US.
It is also a market where dual SIM phones are useful. Carriers are running promotions all the time, so consumers pick which SIM is offering the better deal on a call by call basis.
I understand the justification of paying for incoming calls, since they don't have separate prefix codes for mobile (which means that the caller does not know they're calling a mobile, and therefore you cannot put the charge on the caller), but incoming SMS, where you don't even get a choice over whether you want to receive it? "Peculiar" is putting that very nicely...
Yes. We used to get charged $0.25 per text with Verizon. Occasionally we would get included on a group text that would create 30 some replies that we would receive. I was not happy.
It's true. $0.10 or $0.15 is my cost for all texts over 200 whether I send or receive them. Usually I don't go over, on average maybe 1-3 extra messages a month over 200. Upgrading to the unlimited tier for $15/month more doesn't make sense when I can reach all my friends but a few via Facebook, Google Talk or iMessages on their mobile devices. I can reach all my friends via one of those if they're on a computer but that's not always convenient, and no one I know uses twitter except to follow people.
Yes... until smartphone IM support finally offered competition that started to squash this particular aspect of price gouging.
Many people still "pay" for SMS. When we had outrageous per SMS charges (yes, also for incoming messages), carriers started to offer "bulk" -- e.g. 1000 messages per billing cycle -- plans and then "ulimited" SMS plans, typically for $30, $20, eventually $10 / month extra.
Now, more an more plans included "unlimited SMS". Not all, though, and total monthly bills that include such "unlimited SMS" vary widely. One also has to remain aware / beware of international SMS messages, where one's plan may still charge exorbitant per message fees.
P.S. Back in the days of high charges, just be so lucky as to end up on the receiving end of messages from some romantic interest who thinks your phone number is their interest's number. Obnoxious, perhaps crass messages, and to boot you're paying for the "privilege" of receiving them. (Fortunately, the carrier's limited blocking options sufficed to squelch those when he wouldn't believe I wasn't her.)
I can confirm it can be abused really easily. Back in middle school (2006? 2007 maybe?) me and my friends used a firefox macro addon and a free anonymous text website to send a few hundred vulgar texts to a girl that one of us had recently broken up with.
The next day at school one of us got called into the office. The girl's parents had hired a private investigator to find out who sent the texts. My friend denied everything and there was no real evidence so no one got caught (turns out these types of shenanigans are NOT okay, and illegal).
We had racked up her phone bill into over-usage rates and I'm not sure if the carrier dropped the charges we had produced or whether her parents had to pay. I can't imagine that night's incoming text cost being below $200.
But now I believe most teenage girls in the US have unlimited texting.
Yes, I still pay by the SMS. AT&T wants $20/month for unlimited SMS ($30/for all phones on my account). They used to offer $5 & $10 plans, but dropped those options.
It is nice to be able to iMessage w/other iPhone users.
My wife is on a pay as you go (prepaid) plan and each SMS counts as a minute.
Yes. However practically speaking no one who uses SMS really pays per message anymore. It's usually bought in packages (200 a month, 400 a month, etc), or unlimited.
Most cell phones come with some sort of messaging plan, but historically yes you had to pay.
The routing inbound calls you typically have to pay, but the costs are usually so negligible, most VoIP/landline provides include them for free with the overall subscription.
Pretty sure AT&T charged for incoming text messages. It's been a while since I've looked at an AT&T bill (I've since switched), so it's possible that I'm mistaken, but I'd give that statement an 85% confidence rating.
Can confirm. When I moved to the US, had to pay for incoming SMS. My friends who did not have an unlimited SMS plan, had SMS completely blocked so that they don't receive unwanted messages.
I don't know anyone who gets charged for receiving SMS in 2014 (and it has been like that at least since 2011 when I came to the US). All the plans I had (Verizon, AT&T, T-mobile) had free unlimited SMS (sending & receiving).
I live in the bay area so maybe it's not like that in other parts of the country.
I pay $60/month for 3gb of LTE with T-Mobile and get unlimited texting and calling on top of that. I don't particularly care about the texting or calling so I consider it free. I'd pay the $60 just for the internet.
ATT charges $20/month + tax for unlimited texting alone. Which is about £12. For £12 (inc. tax) on GiffGaff in the UK you get:
- 250 minutes Calling
- Unlimited texts
- Unlimited Internet (no tethering, or £10 w/1 GB and tethering)
So Americas get massively screwed on their wireless services. The fact that tons of people on here are praising the insanely expensive "Unlimited" texting offers is just bonkers.
For the cost of just your unlimited texting in the US you can pay your entire monthly cellphone bill in the UK, consider that. And due to tax, surcharges, etc the $20/month is actually closer to $30/month.
T-Mobile has a $30/month pre-paid plan with 100 minutes, unlimited text, unlimited data (unsure about tethering). I really wanted to like the plan and tested it out in my area with a Nexus 4 I picked up for playing around with an Android phone (only had iPhones the past few years, so wanted it for both development and to see if it was practical for me to switch). Unfortunately the coverage sucked once I left the area since they didn't offer data roaming. Great along the interstate, terrible in the country (I often take the scenic routes when traveling long distances if I'm not in a rush, I hate driving on the interstate.). If I lived in an area with really good T-mobile coverage and primarily traveled to those sorts of areas it'd be an awesome plan, and similar in cost to what you're talking about.
it's part of the reason i dropped out of the major player market (AT&T, etc) and have moved to a second tier provider (in my case, net10). my bill is 50% of what it was for essentially the same service (minus visual voicemail on my iPhone, but it's not worth $600+/year to me).
unlimited internet (throttled at 2.5gig/month), unlimited text, unlimited minutes. $45/month = £26. Not perfect, but livable.
No, all four major providers have included unlimited text in their standard post-paid plans for a while now. If you're still on a legacy plan, you might not be aware of this.
In the UK if it starts with 07 it is to a mobile and if it starts with 01-03 it is to a landline. How very complicated!
Plus doesn't the US have hidden rates too? If I call someone on a landline and they're in the same city I pay less than if I call someone two cities over even though the two MIGHT have the same exact area code ("long distance").
> Cellular was easily rolled out without disruption. An existing number could switch to cellular and no one else would have to know or care. If you were a business (eg a plumber) you didn't have to worry about people calling you fretting over getting charged more for the call than your competitors.
> Numbers are easily portable. You can switch any number to use cellular. Countries using the other scheme can have portability but usually it is limited to cellular area codes only.
That's a non-issue. Call forwarding exists outside the US too(!). You can buy generic numbers, or a landline that forwards to your cellphone (or rings at both).
But ultimately your entire argument is defeated by one fact: In the US when a telemarketer calls you YOU pay for the pleasure. You're literally paying for people to spam or hassle you.
(BTW I am a Brit, but have lived in the US for ~15 years).
The UK is also complicated - eg if a number starts with 08.
There aren't hidden rates. You are applying a British mentality - that the area code defines an area. In the US it is the exchange numbers (next 3 digits after the area code). It used to be normal to not dial area codes. I got bitten by this exact issue the first time I made a "local" call from a hotel, arguing with the front desk that a call to the same area code is by definition the same (local) area.
There are actually 3 distances - local, local toll, and long distance. You can actually have a different carrier for each one! For example local is a few miles around, local toll would be 20-100 miles away, and long distance after that. (Americans like things complicated.) When I had a land line it was about 5 times as much to call San Francisco (~60 miles away) than New York (~2,000 miles away)!
Local calls are included with your service price, also called "free" by people. However the base service price was about four times what I paid in the UK. There was a wonderful paper I saw years ago and haven't been able to find again, where they showed that Americans preferred fixed pricing - ie you know in advance what your bill will be - versus a pay as you go model. Not only that they are willing to pay more for the certainty of those future bills.
The issue you are thinking of is that the termination rates in some rural areas are very high in order to subsidise providing the service there. Consequently various "free" conference calls and similar services are sourced out of those areas. The rural telco then shares the revenue. The caller's telco ends up paying for the increased rates - it isn't visible to the caller. This is why there is some weasel language in various phone contracts saying they won't connect you to those numbers/services.
Call forwarding isn't a perfect solution. It still requires the cooperation of two companies - the one with the number, and the one where the number is forwarded to.
The argument isn't defeated as such - rather the US had no option than to go the way it did. Call prices are very cheap when adding together what the caller and recipient pay, compared to the rest of the world where some of it is hidden and regulators have stepped in setting rates rather than there being meaningful competition.
Telemarketers aren't allowed to call cell phones. Obviously that won't just stop them, but since they are actually trying to sell something and they need to contact a reasonable volume of people to have success, it is a lot easier for them to be detected and blocked by the carriers. I get about one telemarketer call a year. I could also contact my carrier and they would remove charges for telemarketing calls.
The majority of cellular and landline plans now are unlimited voice calls in any direction, so most of the earlier issues aren't present any more.
The US is FULL of hidden rates! In fact, you can make a huge killing exploiting these things, and a lot people do exactly that. Some areas in the US cost multiple cents per minute. There is no such such as a flat rate to the US. People sell it, but they're just hoping you call cheap places, and if you don't, they cut you off. It surprises me how few people can do that math and love paying a flat rate.
That's why so many free conference call places were in Iowa. They were exploiting the 5 cent tariffs Iowa had published in combination with people expecting all of the US to cost the same. Big carriers stopped terminating the calls, but the FCC slapped them back and insisted they had to terminate such calls.
> Plus doesn't the US have hidden rates too? If I call someone on a landline and they're in the same city I pay less than if I call someone two cities over even though the two MIGHT have the same exact area code ("long distance").
Landline to landline, yes. This got me when we moved back to Georgia 14 years ago. Friends in the 229 area code that lived 50 miles away in one direction, local, 50 miles in another, long distance.
However, for cellular (now) you pay by minutes, and, as far as I can tell, unless you're hitting 900 numbers or similar, a minute is a minute, local or long distance. I have never had my own landline so I don't know the current status there, and most people I know with one only use it for security systems (so they can get away with the cheapest $10 or $20/month plan with no long distance).
> That's a non-issue. Call forwarding exists outside the US too(!). You can buy generic numbers, or a landline that forwards to your cellphone (or rings at both)
How does that work from the caller's point of view in caller-pays systems? Does the caller pay the landline rate (because he called a landline), and then the owner of the landline pays the cellphone rate for the forwarding from the landline to the cellphone?
I think that "get screwed" is a bit harsh. Mobile operators in Europe (and in Ireland, specifically, where I have the most experience) cheerfully sell you unlimited voice and SMS bundles, just like in the States. I have a Meteor number ("area code" 085) that can call any other mobile Irish number for exactly 0.00EUR/minute and it costs me 20EUR/month, or 10EUR if all I want to do is talk and use pay-per-use rates for data and text. Heck, 30EUR will get me all of the above for a zero-rate.
It all comes down to the system you're used to. I'm used to the US system so it seems "odd" that I pay to make a call in Europe. Then again, with a mobile phone in the States that doesn't have unlimited SMS or voice, I pay to originate the voice or text contact all the same, _and_ the recipient pays, too. Know what numbers plumbers advertise on the side of their vans in Ireland? Mobile numbers, readily identified when starting with 083-089.
Number portability is, simply, what it is. Initially, number portability in the States was only allowed between wireless numbers until years later when WLNP was allowed. Even then, you could only port numbers between carriers with facilities in the same area/local code. It's only been in the past six years or so that nationwide, wireless number porting has been a reliable thing and only really because cellular systems in the States have grown so large with so many regional ratecenter connections. Landline number porting still takes almost two weeks with some carriers, if it even works.
By "get screwed" I meant the total charges for a call - ie adding together what the callers and recipients pay. The callers can't avoid the charges, and aren't a customer of the recipient's carrier. This means there is little competitive pressure to lower the termination rates, and ultimately regulators have stepped in. It is far preferable that rates automatically dropped as a result of competition.
It might be a holdover from "car phones", where incoming calls were charged for. Very few had them and it could be assumed that the owner had enough cash to pay for the privilege.
IIRC the US had some version of cell phones before e.g. Europe, so probably kept the same business models. The rest of the world was able to rethink the model and with the benefits of hindsight, created cell-specific phone numbers and were able to charge callers rather than phone owners the extra portion.
I think the tabbed navigation on: https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ is going to confuse some users. Some people will never see the SMS pricing even though they are looking for it. Banner blindness is a real problem and applies not only to ads but to navigational stuff as well.
Do explain how you get screwed on mobile termination rates! Mobile phone calls are considerably more expensive in Europe per minute, but you as a recipient may not realise it. See my comment that points to a post with more details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8075829
BTW I am a Brit and think the US is dysfunctional in many ways.
What you are paying for is not the incoming call getting to your carrier, but for your carrier to then connect to your phone using radio (or whatever). Same for outgoing calls. To flip it around, when I call YOUR number, why should it be relevant to me how YOU choose connect to the phone network? Why should I care if you use cell, satellite, machines in the exchange, a piece of string, copper or whatever else comes along in the future?
If the US wanted to use separate area codes for mobile then it could only practically be done by making the area codes longer. This would be a massive disruption. What solution would you propose?
Are you seriously saying that people should understand at least 36 different random unrelated area codes to cost more? And that people who can't do that are inferior and just being difficult? Because in other countries they did things like make mobile area codes always start with 7 - ie only one rule to remember.
Well as a Brit you should know how you make more room in the phonenumber space: awkwardly, slowly, in a series of steps, and with a huge amount of disruption. But a few years later everyone's forgotten about it.
This is in spite of the fact that in order to get from where we were to begin with - with '01' as the area code for London, for example - to where we are today, peoples' numbers went first through the 071/081 split, then through the 'add 1' 0171/0181 era after phONE day, and then finally moved over to the 0207/0208 codes, as a foundation ultimately for London having an 020 area code.
In Britain it was relatively easy as there was only one phone company, plus the one in Hull. Britain already had variable length area codes and numbers, so it wasn't as disruptive. (I was very amused to find one place where the area code was longer than the number!)
The US & Canada had far more companies, plus NANPA 3/7 format being hard coded everywhere - forms, computer programs etc. Trying to implement changes to phone number length will make y2k efforts look trivial.
Heck when places started requiring the dialling of area codes because "local" areas especially big cities had more than one, was disruptive enough. That started happening in the mid-nineties.
Given the choice between huge disruption, or termination fees being the same and the costs of connecting between the phone company and the person making/receiving the calls being their business, the latter isn't an unreasonable choice. When I call you, why should it be relevant to me if you are connected to your choice of carrier by a piece of copper, fibre, radio waves or whatever else?
I remember when Australia extended all phone numbers to be standard 10 digits (from either 8 or 9 digits previously, depending on area) - I was 11 when it started, and somehow I managed to work it out and still use the phone.
If you're telling me the "greatest country in the world" can't transition to a sensible numbering system because it's "too hard" I will simply point you once again to the various other things Americans are hilariously and depressingly behind the rest of the world on... anything related to measurements, banking, healthcare, politics, comes to mind.
> why should it be relevant to me if you are connected to your choice of carrier by a piece of copper, fibre, radio waves or whatever else
because as someone else in the threaded highlighted, it can be abused (especially in the case of SMS which don't require you to 'pick up' to bill you) to a ridiculous level.
But see Australia was already starting with variable length numbers. NANPA started in the late forties. It is obviously possible to change things, but would require extraordinary effort. For example every computer program knew that NANPA numbers were exactly 10 digits since every program was written after NANPA came about. Having to change all of them would make y2k look trivial!
Something being missed is that callers are still charged to reach your phone company at the base rates - that is not free to them. You then pay your phone company extra for how you connect to them. Abuse is a red herring. When I go to other countries and get a local SIM I get inundated with SMS, which doesn't cost money but sure does cost a huge annoyance. SMS spam is very rare in the US, with the carriers cooperating to stamp it out and always refunding people for any.
The only sms "spam" I have seen.. I think ever, having had a mobile phone in Australia for ~13 years and now Thailand for about 2 years, is messages from the network operator (and its sister companies), here in Thailand. In Australia I don't remember ever getting "spam".
My point was not about "professional" spam, it was about the potential for personal abuse. Someone posted in the thread earlier about racking up $~200 of sms charges against a friend's ex girlfriend.
And that ex-girlfriend would have been able to get the charges reversed plus legal recourses. It is considerably easier to do that when you show you incurred real costs, versus when receiving them is "free". The phone calls to your carrier customer service cost them money too so they are keen to reduce those.
More expensive to whom? When I lived in France I paid 20 Euro per month for unlimited everything, including international calls to over 100 countries. As a subscriber, my per-minute rate was not of any concern to me since there wasn't one.
Did those unlimited international calls also include to international cell phones? Cell phones are usually excluded because the termination rates are so much higher as my calling card screenshot showed.
Edit: I looked up free - a well known French ISP. Guess what - they have free calls all over the world to landlines, but charge for mobile - http://www.free.fr/adsl/telephone.html
Yup, that you do, and crazy it is. What you're supposed to do is get the unlimited text plan so that it doesn't matter. If you don't use SMS enough to justify the $20/month for unlimited, too bad for you (at least for AT&T I'm pretty sure it's unlimited or $0.25/text these days, with nothing in between). Or just do what I did and switch to T-Mobile.
You could use a paid VOIP provider like Voip.ms and make calls over your data connection. It's the same concept, except you're paying $0.01/minute instead of nothing.
There's fairly little spam, because the providers are happy to disconnect people for any sort of automation. So most companies are a bit skittish about taking on people that might be doing that, as they don't want to lose their connection.
In fact, it's a bit surprising Twilio's still able to offer such things. They routinely violate the rules that apply to the rest of us in the industry. Usually you've got to keep a 1:3 in:out ratio per number. Not sure what position Plivo's in. In light of the ratio requirements, maybe free inbound SMS is a way to help out on that.
If you're getting spammed you just tell the mobile phone provider and they remove the charges. In my experience it's pretty trivial to get large clearly repetitive charges removed.
A number of comments express surprise that US carriers charge for inbound SMS traffic. Note that this announcement is with regards to an SMS gateway service, not regular end-user SMS traffic.
I know a more experienced engineer. He told me when engineers first invented texting to communicate with each other it's essentially free for telecom companies so yes we Americans are overpaying like crazy for texting.
Notice the unit of account. Twilio absurdly uses $ while Plivo more sensibly uses ¢, I can't think of any other reason for this than to make it difficult to compare prices and encourage customers to fall into the trap you just did.
When I'm setting a budget, it's going to be in dollars. If I'm getting prices in cents, I have to remember to convert, or I'm going to make the same mistake your parent comment did.
The currency is dollars, not cents. Most prices are set in dollars, not cents. Most transactions are performed in dollars, not cents. Budgeting is done in dollars, not cents.
Save trouble and use the same units everybody else does.
I saw "0.65" and was very surprised as well. Stared at it in disbelief for a few seconds before coming here to comment.
I'm sure they've A/B tested it, but I've got to believe we're not the only 2 people to ever make that mistake and bounce from the site thinking, "what are they crazy?"
You're against an advertising-supported internet? If so, there are places where you could start your protest that excute that a lot less transparently and with a few less orders of magnitude of vetting than here. Unless you prefer 'herbal Cialis' ads:)
There are a lot of things wrong with India but the telecom industry here(at least up to around 2010) should be a showcase for regulation done right. Dirt cheap sms rates(around .001 usd), 3G rates, fixed monthly subscription charge for roaming, tower-sharing (multiple mobile operators share a cellular tower), number-porting, second-pulse billing,and around 10-11 operators to choose from.
Sure, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India probably squeezed a little to hard and the 2G and 3G corruption scandals that followed reversed some of those trends to an extent; But the situation is still much better than in the US.