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The Internet Science

World's First SMS Text Messaging May Fade Soon 91

Posted by timothy from the power-and-intimacy-of-pocket-calculators dept.
Infractor writes: "UK Mobile provider Orange has moved to pull the plug on the world's first ever text message community -- Locust Cellular Linux hacker Jon Anderson built the service, similar to wireless email and IRC chat back in 1996. A student Linux project, accidently became the first service to offer interactive text message facilities on this UK network. After Locust's forced closure was announced to its members, a huge campaign has been organised by the subscribers to draw attention to the incredible value which has been created by this unique SMS community." (There's more below.)

"Hundreds of personal letters and testimonials have already been posted on the community action site which is at SaveLocust.org -- This site also has an expose on what is described as 'Orange's Hypocrisy' over claims that it is launching a competitive service to Locust. An article has already appeared on TheRegister.co.uk

For the UK, this is a unique social phenomena, driven by the power and intimacy of text messaging. Please review the evidence for yourself. This community shows what technology can really do in the wireless world. Locust still runs on good ole Linux 2.0.33 -- if it aint broke ... :)"
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World's First SMS Text Messaging May Fade Soon More

World's First SMS Text Messaging May Fade Soon

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  • This was always a good service (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Llanfairpwllgwyngyll ( 81289 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @05:49AM (#2653063) Journal
    I used this service for a long time. It was always reliable (and you could even play chess against it on long train journeys :-)

    It would be a great shame to lose it. Last time it was under threat was when Orange changed from a flat monthly fee for SMS (2 quid a month, unlimited SMS) to a charge-per-SMS (0.05 GBP per message). A deal was struck then that kept Locust online.

    It will be a sad day if it shuts - genuine innovation and genuine value-for-money :-(
    • genuine innovation and genuine value-for-money

      Yup, genuine value for your money, unfortunately it doesn't fit with Orange's business model i.e. to make money, not give services away for free.

      Nobody really expected SMS to take off in the way it did, hell some networks didn't even have SMS capability, so you can't blame Orange if what seemed like a good idea at the time suddenly starts costing the company a lot of money, and is thus withdrawn or re-modeled.

      As I see it, if Locust is as good as everyone seems to think, they won't mind paying to use it, and another deal can be struck. If not then it will go under.
      smacks of free as in beer, rather than free as in speech here.

      cmclean

      • I am not understanding how sending an SMS message could cost Orange any money. They have the infastructure in place already. I would think it is much like setting up a local area network and then transfering files. The system is already setup so it does not cost anything to actually transfer files.

        If I am wrong then okay but it does not seem as though I am wrong. Orange owns the stuff already and any money they get at all for SMS is just gravey. I think what happened was someone was like OMG 300k messages a day at 0.05 would give us 15,000 a month and we are only charging these guys 60 dollars a month so we need to change things because that is a lot of money.
        • It's the same as with any internet service provider...Sure, they already have the hardware in place for you to dial into them, and it doesn't cost them more than a few cents' electrons to stay connected for an hour.

          But they're still charging you for a convenience, aka. a service.
      • I look at it this way - Locust has provided really cool community features over SMS since 1996, years before the networks had a clue about it. I could send and receive emails, chat to people at the other end of the country, check the lottery results and do all kinds of great stuff. All I had to do was pay 3quid/month plus my SMS charges
        On top of that I got privacy with a username, so if any creepy idiot wanted to stalk me they would find it impossible unless I gave them my number.
        I still had to pay for the SMS I sent, which averaged between 500 and 700 per month!!!
        How much does it cost Orange to send them? Bugger all, they are covering their operating costs and probably making a 1000% profit on each SMS sent even at the moment.
        Vodafone for instance recently announced a hefty increase in turnover, mainly from SMS. Moreover, the technology for SMS was something that came as an added bonus for them when they built their network - it wasn't something they invested in deliberately and they own all their transmitters so *where* are their operating costs? They would have to maintain the network for vox traffic anyway - come on!

        Locust is a community that is regularly sending hundreds of chargeable SMS' per person, per week and encouraging people to use SMS. It is going to get removed because Orange claim they want even more money, but its far more likely they just want to kill it off as competition to services they intend to launch in the near future. At a point in time when there are millions of SMS being sent everyday, do they seriously decide that the flat fee structure for this one small company is harming their profit margin? I don't think so.
        This community swaps advice, helps each other out and generally feels great to be a part of. And what are Orange going to replace it with? A crappy pay per use SMS-email service, perhaps? Something that costs an absolute fortune to use, like 12p per incoming message when you get an email because they have to recoup the numerous billions they spent on their 3G licences? Or maybe an attempt to replicate the sense of community that Locust has been offering for the past 6 years.

        Orange spokespersons have already lied, they claimed they were not planning on launching any competing services, and yet in their monthly magazine thats exactly what they say they are about to do - "new exciting services for SMS coming soon from Orange"

        Pah.

        The most ironic part is that Locust at it's height had a couple of thousand users, and half of those moved to Orange so they could use Locust (before inter-network SMS).

        Orange suck.
    • Obviously you've only used the service and never had to put in any work to support it. Trust me, it doesn't just spring out of thin air

  • SMS messaging (Score:2, Informative)

    by joonasl ( 527630 )
    To bad a genuinely helpful and uncommercally started SMS community will shut down. Atleast here in Finland most of the available SMS services are run by the operators and are generally shameless rip offs for your money.. "Order your biorythm to your mobile, only 1 per message"

  • Let's look at the facts here... (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Dodger ( 10689 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @06:12AM (#2653088) Homepage
    Locust is a profit-making company. It's in their interests to maintain the status quo, because it provides them with a model for making money.

    Locust's Terms and Conditions say include the statement that Locust reserves the right to change price plans or service features at any time if required, yet when Orange exercise the same right, they start kicking and screaming.

    There are other mobile phone network operators in the UK - Vodafone, Cellnet, One2One. Why doesn't Locust talk to one of them with a view to switching providers?

    I'm sorry, but I don't really see what the big deal is here. Seems to be another case of people wanting something without having to pay for it, both in terms of the disgruntled Locust users, and the people who profit from it.

    • Re:Let's look at the facts here... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tfb ( 49770 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @09:40AM (#2653302)
      I think this misses the point. Locust has about 600 users, who pay L3/month. That's L1800/month income. The zero-point cost for a billing system is probably more than this. Billing in arrears would also expose Locust to the risk of default which they don't currently have. Whether or not Locust *wants* to charge per message it probably cannot do so and remain anything like it is at present: it either would need to grow enormously to justify the overhead of the billing system, or it would need to crank up the base charge by a large factor.

      Really, billing is viable if it's either flat-rate, in advance (like locust currently is), or if you're huge (like Orange). So what Orange are *actually* saying is that they just aren't interested in small operations: unless you can afford a billing system they don't care.

      This is actually very pertinent to the net: the reason the net as we know it today exists is because people could do small-scale experiments without having to worry about billing. You could write a system to send messages from one machine to another without having to stress away about charging per message, and suddenly you've invented email or news, and later on you could invent some crappy little SGML-based networked hypertext system and arrogantly call it the `world wide web' when it only ran at CERN anyway, and you could do these kinds of experiments because you weren't getting billed per packet, and so you didn't have to worry about passing on that cost to the users. An argument that's often heard in the UK is that the net took off better in the US because *local calls are free*.

      The moment you have to worry about billing you're in an entirely different place. You have to make business cases and worry about risk of default. Worst of all you have to have a billing system which means nightmare database hell and lots of paper and so on. If your basic transaction is very small, like an SMS or an email, or a packet, you stand a serious chance of your costs being completely dominated by the billing overhead. I don't know the figures for telcos but I bet a really large chunk of their profit is eaten by the billing system.

      I think there's really a lot of evidence that having to worry about billing simply stifles a lot of innovation. Of course, Orange can say `well, so what?', and that is their right. But I think its a catastrophically dumb decision, because they (and the other telcos) really need to foster innovation, because no one
      really has much idea where to go next. They've kind of done voice, since everyone now has a mobile phone (maybe not yet in the US, but Europe is pretty saturated). SMS was this thing that no-one saw coming that has been hugely successful, but it works fine on 2G networks. So they've now spent enormous money on 3G and they really have no idea what to do with it - video is not going to be that interesting, neither is the web, and no one knows what is, really).

      But they can't see this - they're so panic stricken because they've spent this huge amount of money, that they are obsessing away about making everything they do profitable and trying to rake in money from SMS traffic (which, really, must be a big money earner: people send billions and billions of SMSs), instead of actually thinking a bit and allowing some lunatic in a basement to play with some idea without having to buy Oracle to do the billing. Of course they probably don't want to allow a huge company to do this, but that's easily arranged by just throttling the bandwidth that Locust (say) can have: then they can't grow beyond an experiment.

      What is saddest of all is that they are missing a huge trick here. The problem is that billing costs don't scale down. But the telcos already have a billing system, they are large so the costs aren't too bad, and they have this really big stick to beat their customers with: pay up or we cut off your phone. So the obvious thing for them to do is to get into bed with the little innovative people to provide a billing service, which they can do at small extra cost, and which would enable innovation to procede without the crippling overhead. Even better, you only get the service if you're a customer of the telco concerned, because they need to be able to bill you, so you probably move your phone to them too. This probably isn't right for locust-as-it-stands, but some kind of semi-locust type thing could do this, if only the telcos had half a brain between them.

      --tim
    • Agreed completely. The problem is that they do not have a viable business model. The only reason Locust have existed as long as they have is that Orange had a billing plan that was good for them. Orange was essentially funding the existance of this company, as Orange were not making any revenue (let alone profit) from the SMS's sent by the users.
      Unfortunately, the business plan was flawed, and it is time for the company to die unless they can find another way to monetize the community. Slashdot figured that out, and succeeded at transitioning.

  • Mobile ICQ (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here in Australia sms is usually around 20 a message. I really want to see the cost come down and the complete introduction of mobile icq. Already you can sms from your icq and sms to icq for some carriers in some countries.

    What is great about ICQ is you catch up with someone when you may not have even considered calling them ( you just see them on). THis would be great if extented to mobiles and you always got a list of your friends (and otherwise) that had their mobiles turned on.

    • Re:Mobile ICQ (Score:2, Interesting)

      by jquirke ( 473496 )
      Vodafone Australia [vodafone.com.au] apparently offers ICQ from phone functionality, they can afford it possibly because they have no customers.

      It is rumored that Telstra [telstra.com] will be offering free SMS next year, I have no idea if there is any truth to that. In any case it's no good to me because I'm with Optus.

      But I agree, 20c, or rather 22c inc GST to send 200 bytes of data across the network is ridiculous, hardly "excellent value" as the telcos describe it. Imagine if your ISP charged with those rates!
      • Not likely. Telstra has increased their SMS charges now to 25 cents.

        Vodafone have been offering free SMS on their plans for over a year now. Not unlimted, but a reasonable amount.

    • Re:Mobile ICQ (Score:2, Informative)

      by big_nipples ( 412515 )
      My Sprint PCS phone here in the states allows me to log in to AIM...

      Unfortunately, per-minute charges apply, which makes it much easier to just call the person I want to talk to...
      • I use an Orange mobile phone in the UK and am unable to get AOL's WAP client to work. I know people on Cellnet that can use it. Does anyone know why this happens? Is there any way to get AIM to work on an Orange phone? I've tried it on a Nokia 7110 and a Nokia 6210 - and as far as I know both of these handsets can use AIM on other networks.
        • Orange's WAP gateway sucks.

          You need to change your WAP settings to other values.. such as your normal ISP dial-up number, username and password - and use 193.113.200.195 as your WAP gateway. Only catch is it might be charged at a higher rate than Orange's own WAP service.

  • Is locust doomed anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by reachinmark ( 536719 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @06:15AM (#2653093) Homepage
    What will happen when GPRS [ericsson.com] becomes more common? Many of the services that Locust offer via SMS seem much more naturally suited to GPRS. It may be that Locust will run out of users in the long-run anyway as these services become more common place as part of a GPRS subscription.

  • Analogy to road infrastructure ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LL ( 20038 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @06:28AM (#2653107)
    .... reminds me of a regional finance company that specialises in infrastructure funding (things like ring-roads, traffic bypasses, fibre, etc). They built a high-speed traffic bypass asnd started charging tolls. However, they found out residents were still using local roads so they did a deal with the state authority repsonsible for public roads to seal them off.

    The point is that they did the conomic analysis and showed that there was a net savings in petrol consumption and driver's time. But in order for them to pay for building the new infrastructure, they had to convince motorists that there was no longer a free-ride. The problem is that motorists only saw the daily toll charges and not the weekly savings in petrol/time. Not to mention that very little advance warning was given to changing the road access. You can probably guess the PR fallout resulting from this :-).

    Sooner or later a similar scenario will happen with communications networks as they reach the limits of scaiability and in order to transition to a more efficient/lower cost/reduced maintenance system, they need to convince people of the benefits of switching This usually requires changing their usage patterns. Unfortunately aggressive telco upstarts don't always have the diplomatic skills to address customer's expectations. Pricing is a particularly sensitive point as there may be incredible customer acquisition costs or hidden cross-subsidies that distort the cost structure.

    There has probably been some over-investments in network infrastructure that the current recession is revealing. As Warrne Buffett says, it's only when the tide goes out that you see who's swimming naked. Companies that pass the buck (literally) for their corporate mistakes are going to have a hard time keeping onto their customer base and will have to either swallow the losses (and shock horror forfeit the CEO bonuses/options) or else try and merge to gain monopoly pricing power and justify their executive packages. While some people may decry the double-sided nature of telcos and Wall Street, hopefully the survivors will be more sensitive to their users's needs.

    LL
    • The problem is that motorists only saw the daily toll charges and not the weekly savings in petrol/time.

      Ha ha ha. The problem is that some greedy looser always wants to come between people and what they want. It's the "asshole in the middle" idea. The usual line is that they know better and that things will really be improved with you giving them money.

      • Heh (Score:1)

        by inKubus ( 199753 )
        We are all the asshole in the middle. If someone is coming between you and something you want and you don't let them, aren't you coming between that person at what they want?
  • On top of all the Locust problems, Jon must be getting a bit sick of being mistaken for a progressive rock singer..! (The other Jon Anderson is a member of Yes [yesworld.com])

  • A bit of history (Score:5, Informative)

    by matthew.thompson ( 44814 ) <matt&actuality,co,uk> on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @06:39AM (#2653119) Journal
    Locust is and always was used by a minority of users. 600 users out of Orange's 10,000,000.

    It sprang up out of Orange's original free SMS service. Back in the days when SMS was hardly ever used and it was impossible to SMS across competing phone networks Orange offered, for £2.50 per month, SMS sending and receiving with no charges per message - and they didn't charge the monthly fee either.

    This was on the basis that Orange hadn't perfected the system and that later on they would start to charge for the service - something that was told to everyone who signed up. Because of this Locust was able to start using very basic technology (A unix box and a phone with a serial cable) and reasonable low overheads.

    When Orange started charging for Text messages they offered Text1500, a bulk text message service for £60 per month which offered unlimited messages.

    At this rate, with Locust sending out 300,000 messages per month it was costing them about £0.0002 per message for the over the air portion. This compares very favourable to the £0.02 that other SMS sending services charge.

    Companies today, more so with the economy slowing, are trying to make more money out of all of their subscribers and this is just one way that Orange have found to try and do that.

    Also of note is that the same people as run Locust offer commercial SMS services run "properly" (Linked to mobile networks rather than using a mobile phone on a PC).
    • but your math fails to make sense. it's my understanding that locust users are paying full price for sms messages, so orange is getting the full price there.

      sms consumes a tiny bit of resources. if locust is shut down on the 18th, orange won't have more capacity, but it will have less sms messages which means less money. bandwidth, once there is always there, the only real way to make money with it is to make sure it gets used.
      • Although Orange would be getting full whack from the subscribers sending messages they are getting 1/300th or less of the revenue from the SMS sent via Locust. Plus Locust can generate more than one SMS in response to an email or command send by the user.

        I'm assuming that Orange have done the arithmetic and worked out that any revenue lost from customers sending messages TO locust is made up by no longer having to subsidise Locust's services.

        Out of curiosity I also wonder wether Orange were sending a bill to Locust with all 300,000 text messages per month detailed. Lot's of trees there.

        M@t :o)

  • This is not a WAP portal (Score:5, Insightful)

    by imrdkl ( 302224 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @06:42AM (#2653123) Homepage Journal
    and therefore, it's got to go.

    Why? The WAP portal is where the Euro providers really want their subscribers to go for information, news, etc. GPRS will give WAP some semblance of usability, after the initial flop, and many Euro providers, including the one I work for, have invested millions in their portal offerings. The old style SMS messaging services like this one are OK, as long as you agree to pay for the messages they send you, but anything that detracts from the portal is definitely not on the A-list.

    Bottom line, the providers gotta pay down the G3 licenses, and SMS (eventually packetized SMS) is probably the best way to "migrate" the population slowly into G3 without losing the SMS-crazed kids who pay the bills.


    • WAP has failed once, and will fail again. Look to the Far East to see where the market will go, it isn't WAP its rich guis and more complex apps.

      Java and other "rich" languages will be running on the next generation of mobile phones. WAP was a short term attempt to con people into buying pointless phones. WAP requires always on networking, something that doesn't exist in a tunnel or a tube, rich apps handle network failure and network blips.

      The future is out there in Japan and the Far East. It is SMS, it is MMS (multi-media messaging system) and it is rich apps. Its not WAP, and the providers don't really like WAP as its not giving them the sorts of services they feel people will pay for. Go grap the Nokia 9210, bulky today it maybe, but this is the sort of capabilities that all devices will have in the next year. Its got full web-browsing, not just WAP, Java, full PIM etc etc etc.

      RICH Apps, Reliable Apps, and an end to crappy browser screens. Over the air provisioning of services, its already in the Far East, and it will come to Europe next.

      • Re:WAP will die... (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        We will fight on the protocol and domain.
        We will never surrender!
        Whatever the cost may be.

      • Re:WAP will die... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by elem ( 411711 )
        WAP may not have broad acceptance but it does have niche markets where it is used quite often. For example there was an article in the Saturday Times about six months ago which was basicly about how technology is changing british agriculture and in it it had several farmers saying that they find WAP very usefull because it allows them to check the weather and crop prices while they are in fields, instead of having to cut into their 'free time' when they are at home to check these. I for one find WAP very usefull then I am on the move as it allows me read all the news on CNN.com

        Java and other "rich" languages will be running on the next generation of mobile phones.

        WAP is not a language. WAP (Wireless Aplication Protocol) is a protocol just like HTTP, of which it is (to an extent) a subset. It is just a way of get information to a handset with limited resources in terms of handset overhead and bandwidth. The place where java will appear in phones in on the OS level where Java's native features will be best place to work with the wide range of media that will be pushed to out phones by 3G carriers.

        The future is out there in Japan and the Far East. It is SMS, it is MMS (multi-media messaging system) and it is rich apps. Its not WAP

        You're right, its not WAP, but neither is it SMS or MMS. If you look at the far east the only place where you'll find interesting new things on your mobile is Japan. In Japan their largest mobile telco (DoCoMo) offers a service called i-mode, this is actually just a slightly cut down 3G protocol and has nothing to do with SMS or MMS. In europe GPRS will help to offer similar services untill 3G networks are fully rolled out.

        The 9210 does have some nice features, but since it need a bag to carry it in I'd rather sitck with my laptop and my 6210 expecially since the 6210 offer high-speed data access (when you use it with Orange in the UK, I don't know about other places)

        I think we should be happy with WAP for offering a service to a neich market instead of criticising it simply because it doesn't offer you everything that you want.
      • When I first tried WAP 12 months ago, I thought "this is stupid, I'd never use this". I didn't bother to buy a phone equipped with WAP, i just thought of it as something I'd never use.

        I'm a convert now :) GRPS makes the whole thing actually useable and useful. I've got a new WAP/GPRS phone. It takes about half a second to bring up a GPRS connection, then about 2 seconds to load your typical page. I read news from Yahoo while I walk to work.

        Here in Singapore I pay less than SG$0.005 (US$0.0025) per KB and no time or subscription charges. It works in road tunnels and on the subway.

        I'm going to be mighty pissed when my dot-com employer goes bust and I have to go back to Australia and pay over 4 times that :)

  • Great company (Score:4, Interesting)

    by twoshortplanks ( 124523 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @06:42AM (#2653124) Homepage
    I used to use Locus back in the days when I didn't have a internet connection at home (I lived in halls at uni and we had no landline) to tell me when I got email on a particular address so that I could nip across if I was, say, in the student bar, and read the mail. Importantly it was free for each SMS (unlike any other provider) so spammers didn't end up costing me a fortune.

    Of course now I have broadband at home and fat pipes at work I don't need this anymore, but back then it was a real boon.

    I guess what I'm saying is that these guys offered a real innovative service which I was really grateful for, and I wish them the best in the future.

  • All free services are coming to an end... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is another example of free services coming to an end. More and more cellular providers are blocking messages sent from "free SMS websites" as well. Of course this could be expected... for telecoms and the Internet to be the mega-profitable businesses they were hyped to be, the customers will have to PAY for service. Offering free services is not going to yield you money. Free services were only a teaser to get customers interested.
    • nooooooooooo ! wrong !!!!
      SMS market is very special !
      It CAN be free. It's very cheap for the phone company (only a few servers, very small amount of bandwidth used, etc.), and phone company can make money by sending adverts on it. But most phone companies see SMS as a threat: when people send SMS, they don't phone. And that's the attitude France Telecom (owner of Orange) always had. This is a non rational an monopolistic attitude.
  • British guys, you can thank France Telecom for that.
    That bullshit company has always had a very bad policy towards SMS. You always had to pay to use Itineris, and now Orange SMS, including when using the web-sms gateway (it was only free when it was in beta stage, years ago).
    It's the only phone company that charges for SMS sent from the web in France (SFR is 100% free, Bouygues requires free registration). They're the reason why SMS is so week in France.
    I don't understand why this state-owned company is keeping trying to make money using unfair monopolistic attitude. It should be illegal...
    • In the UK you can send 30 free sms a month from orange.net if you have an orange account, my mum and my sister have both payed a flat fee of £15 to get 5 free texts a day on orange pay as you go (plus 2 30 sec emergency calls when your credit runs out) ONly real prob i have with orange is thier appaling selection of phones... mind you they are taking GPRS (2.5G) seriously after taking part in a trial and having most users telling them it was crap they posptponed the GPRS roll-out. plus i got a free phone ;)
  • France Telecom, Orange, Dutchtone, whatever it's named.. I have a Dutchtone phone myself, and found myself very irritated when Dutchtone appeared to block incoming messages from www.mtnsms.com, and several other free sites. Is that what I pay my monthly subscription for? Oh no, that's supposed to be for the calls I *make*.. Goddamn! Why can't any telecom company in Europe understand that the customer wants the flat fee model? I don't want to pay for every call, message or whatever I send or receive. Fuck off with your business models! I already feel like I'm an object to press money out of, and I'm not the only one. Protests don't work, and the lone providers who *are* good tend to switch to the Orange model as well - just again, because of the money...
    When do these companies learn that I just don't want to spend more than, say $20 per month on my phone? I am not going to use WAP if that's going to cost more. Or I-Mode (whatever it is) or all those lame expensive services. I love to improve my life with better technology, but this is something else. To misquote their advertisements: the only thing that's easy to understand about telecom is that they want all my money.
    • Users like myself don't like a flat fee model. Personally I like paying for just the calls and SMS messages I send, and NOTHING more. For most (moderate) users this is what they want.
      • Let's not decide on what 'most users' want, but the flat fee model simply doesn't exist for phone services in The Netherlands. The USA has had that for decades! For mobile phones, the same: I know a lot of students who would like to pay $20 each month, for sending/receiving an unlimited number of 160 bytes bandwidth, also called an 'sms message' (atm, sending one of those costs you about $0,20 here..)
    • It is not only SMS from free websites what get blocked. I cannot send SMS to a friend in France from my UK Vodafone GSM phone, as the two networks do not have an interconnect agreement (or I think that is the reason!). Even so, I still get charged the 12p fee for sending the SMS, even though it is not delivered. It should be possible to send an SMS from any GSM phone to any other anywhere in the world, in the same way as you can call a landline in a different country irrespective of which teleco the person you are calling obtains service.
  • For the past 2 or 3 days I have been unable to send SMS messages from icq to either orange or vodafone mobiles. It gives the reply "was not received by the recipient."
  • In the early days of GSM the operators saw their core business as voice telephony - they saw SMS as little more than a nuisance that had somehow crept into the spec and had little enthusiasm for it. But now thanks to the efforts of Locust and others who helped popularise SMS the networks are making a fortune on billions of 160-byte data chunks at ~15 cents per.

    So in this case they could at least grandfather Locust's original tariff IMO.
  • ... a bunch of 13yr old kiddies sitting at the back of the bus beeping on and off throughout your journey.

    In the UK, SMS is an addiction for kids. Obviousely the immaturity level at this age shows that they don't understand that having an entire conversation over SMS will in fact take them 10 times as long and cost them 10 times as much as just picking up the phone and saying what they have to say in a few seconds. Some^H^H^H^HMost People need to start using this technology for it's proper purpose.. beep beep beep..

    I certainly wouldn't mind seeing this locust chat/sms service go ;)

    • Yes, the kids are irritating and but there are always going to be irritations in life...

      SMS is great for situations when you don't want the phone to ring or need to get a message across, reliably, to someone in a noisy environment who can't hear what you're saying.

      On my day off, I don't want the phone to ring so I divert all calls to voicemail. If someone really needs to get to me, they can text me. I can ignore that too if I want.

  • It had to come (Score:3, Interesting)

    by seizer ( 16950 ) on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @07:46AM (#2653192) Homepage
    Mobile operators have been kicked in the head by the amazing takeoff of SMS messages. Globally, about 750 million messages get sent a day (that's no typo, check out http://www.gsmworld.com/news/press_2001/press_rele ases_28.html [gsmworld.com] for the scoop. Operators have had to revamp their pricing structure a bit - for instance, they're all now negotiating a "pay me to deliver" (dunno what it's really called) structure, whereby operators charge other operators to receive SMS from their network. Currently, it's screwed up international SMSing (Vodafone won't let me use Excell [excell.to] anymore, for instance). But at this SCALE of messaging, it was bound to come. We just have to hope that they don't pass on the delivery cost to the consumer - I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.

    • Re:It had to come (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dstone ( 191334 )
      We just have to hope that they don't pass on the delivery cost to the consumer

      Oh yes, heaven forbid that the user starts to pay for what they use. That would be horrible. I suggest that we increase taxes. Just don't let them pass the delivery cost along to the consumer. I mean, if that was to happen, all the poor users who don't use the specialty services might actually pay less. And that wouldn't be fair, either.
      • Hey,

        Oh yes, heaven forbid that the user starts to pay for what they use.

        Dude... you want to check your facts by laying on the sarcasm there. Look at this line:

        I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.

        When you send a text message, it starts at one customer's phone, then goes to the provider, then to the recipient's phone. What the poster reffers to is when the recipient uses a different provider - the message goes from sender to provider to other provider to recipient.

        In the first example, the provider charges for handling the message. But what happens if both providers want to charge?

        The poster comments that it would suck if the sender's provider charged the sender and the recipient's provider charged the recipient, since if you were the recipient, you would have to pay for other people sending you messages.

        It would suck.

        Michael
    • I've never paid to receive an SMS, and I don't wish to start now.

      Paying to receive something would be very difficult for the operators to setup commercially, as they would require "Do you want to receive this and be charged for it" feedback loops etc.

      I doubt we'll see that happen.
  • I used to use the One-2-One email to SMS service. However then they decided to introduce a charge of 10pence for every SMS message that they sent you. This was for everything.

    If you changed your password, they would send you a message saying password changed and charge you 10pence for that message, if someone send you junk email, you could be charged upto 90pence as the message would be separated in to 9 Text messages and sent to your phone.

    It looks like Orange want to introduce a similar service, and for the average mobile user it is just not feasible.
    • Orange already do an e-mail alert service.. if you use their e-mail address, used to be 12p a message sent to You, but now it's free, they don't send you the e-mail, but you can check your phone e-mail over their wap service, or if you have an pop3 compatible phone sony j5/j7/z5 you can dial up and get your mail.. not that it's worth it to check your spam :( But you can allways find your nearest web broweser and check it that way.
  • Do you have to be connected to the internet to be able to listen ? With ADSL or better its not so much of a problem, but most of the internet users don't have such a connection...

    I wouldn't want to connect everytime just to listen.. or be restricted so much in how I can use the music... eg, swapping songs onto the laptop before taking a journey...
  • How did I end up posting in the SMS section when I clicked on the "Rent music over the Net" section.... thats a mystery to me.... Sorry.

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