Roland Tanglao's Weblog

The ongoing Fido (and Rogers) r*poff continues. The math: 0.10/0.15 = 66.67%. In a world where every other form of electronic messaging is decreasing in price, Rogers and Fido continue to raise their messaging prices. Needless to say the knock on effect for businesses and innovation and Canada is a net negative. I h*te SMS but it's essential for today's real time business and this is a tax by a member of the Canadian bandwidth oligopoly on businesses and consumers.

QUOTE

U.S. TEXT MESSAGING RATE CHANGE

Please note that effective July 15, 2008, the rate for sending a text message from Canada to the United States is changing to $0.25 (from $0.15). This change also applies to Text messaging options and certain Value packs, as text messages sent to the United States will no longer be included in the options. Pricing does not include applicable taxes.

Visit fido.ca/text for text messaging rates and other important information.

...

International text message Options

25 international text messages $4

50 international text messages $7

END QUOTE

Ken Camp is doing a great job of explaining why the Jaiku mobile client is the future (or at least the ideas are behind it are the future). The key idea is that you can see the presence of your friends and then participate in multi-threaded public conversations as well as (I hope) in the future private messages as well as voice over ip calls and heck even SMS to those people who don't have fancy phones. All of this is done over IP (so it obviously requires a world of affordable unlimited mobile internet); no need to pay the ridiculous phone call, IMS, or SMS "tax" er charge :-) and it's better because of the presence information! Imagine if this was combined with something like Iotum's Relevance engine.... hmmmm. This will happen; just not as fast as early adopters like myself would like.

SMS is dead was controversial which was not a big surprise. It was called stupid and many other things.

Here are some random "SMS is dead" related thoughts:

1. IP always wins. SMS is not over IP and so it will lose once we have affordable mobile internet which we is at least 5 years away. But it's coming!
2. My post was not the clearest piece I have ever written. I should have titled it "SMS is dead - Twitter is proof" instead of "SMS is dead - Twitter killed it".
3. Ken Camp: If SMS is not losing May 16, 2012 and we can mutually decide on what that means, I'll grill you a dinner of your choice. No obligation on your side should I be right! As a Canadian of Filipino heritage, I am an expert at grilling pork :-) but you can decide.
4. Same offer to you Ewan (update: same offer to Ian Dykes who's also in the UK and to Pat Phelan in Ireland - except it would be Guinness in Ireland since it's sooooo great there) except since you are in the UK how about a pint or two of your favourite beverage. I like Guinness and English real ales and it would be my pleasure to buy you a few some day in the unlikely :-) event we agree I am losing on May 16, 2012
5. Of course I'll probably lose the above 2 bets since I always overestimate how fast things die but in the long run it will happen. I've seen it happen with X.400, Usenet, Profs email, Bulletin Board Systems and many many other pre-IP systems that made lots of money back in the day and it will happen with SMS.
6. In Canada to run an SMS shortcode it costs $1000 a month plus per message costs. I know it's apples and oranges but how much traffic and messages could you store and send on an Amazon EC2 and S3 system for that much? And probably more importantly what kind of cool money making apps and services could you provide if there was affordable mobile internet like there will be in the future?
7. Ken is right, SMS is marginal in North America but important and useful elsewhere.
8. Unfortunately after working at Nortel for over 10 years, I am far too well acquainted with how today's so-called 'mobile internet' works and how closed it is.

SMS sucks and twitter proves it. When a well funded startup like Twitter which is full of smart people can't get SMS to scale, then something is wrong. And the something that is wrong is wait for it .... the carriers. The carriers control SMS which is why it sucks. If SMS were NEA it wouldn't suck but it is not so good-bye and good riddance.

SMS is dead. Maybe not today maybe not tomorrow but as soon as we have flat rate affordable mobile internet. The replacement will be something over good 'ole IP. Probably Jabber.