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.

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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

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Rogers implements kludgey SMS "you are now getting r*pped off" alert system instead of reasonable data plans. Title says it all. Instead of wasting money on designing, implementing and telling customers about this system, why not have reasonable cost data plans e.g. $50/month for 1GB, $60 for 2GB (and if there are good business and technical reasons why you can't do this even though other countries can, please communicate them)? Oh well now you know why billing software is a billion dollar business.

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There is a new feature from Fido and Rogers that is available now to all subscribers. The system will automatically send you a text message to alert you when you are using pay per use data. This is especially important for people using an iPhone.

This is even more important for those who are using the $7 unlimited surfing plan. The system will tell you if you are incurring pay per use data charges. If you don't get a text, you should be fine. If you do, watch out and stop using data.

You will receive a warning text at thresholds such as:
- $10, 20, 50, 75, 100

This is available right now for people who are not on any sort of data plan. It will begin working on May 18th for those on a data plan such as the $7 plan.

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Unfortunately technical people often can't seem to get simple things right. Unbelievable but not so unbelievable if you look at the history of HTML and how many many websites to this day are generating "bad" HTML.

FROM Technical Challenges in Content Delivery to Mobile Devices | Mobile Muse:

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Our first surprise came when we discovered that even a "tried-and-true" standard like SMS - that world-wide delivers billions of messages monthly - is not so much a standard as a guideline. Something as simple as inserting line-breaks in content is not, in fact, specified in the protocol as a requirement and it is often not implemented at all by certain platforms. This makes it very difficult to deliver even the simplest "structured content" (i.e. a list) in an easily understandable fashion.

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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.

I've set my trial KRZR K1 to get SMSes from twitter which means that I get 75 SMSes per day. After 50 SMSes have been received, the KRZR runs out of memory and stops receiving text messages. This is not very helpful and a bug. In my opinion it should store the SMSes on the memory card which has plenty of room left. Anybody out there know how to make the KRZR store SMSes on the memory card?