SMS – die already (Short Message Scam)

Mobile Mike is our man in San Francisco. When he’s not sipping beer atop the tallest buildings in the city, he’s buying up everything in the Apple Store down on Stockton Street and spitting in the direction of the AT&T shop across the road.

(NB I was actually able to park outside that Apple Store at 7pm in the evening. Shocking. Imagine trying to do that on Regent Street in London? You’d be lynched before the parking wardens got to you.)

I held back Mike’s piece because I knew Mr Jensen was posting his treatise on SMS this morning. If you haven’t already taken a read, it’s here. It’s a positive take on the medium.

Mike, on the other hand, isn’t that impressed at how AT&T are behaving.

Over to you, Mike:

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Die, SMS, die. No, not SMS Text News, but SMS. As in Short Message Service, also known as the biggest scam in the universe.

I wanted to update to the new 3G iPhone and had heard about the data plan going to $30 (up from $20). Fine. I don’t want to pay $10 more for my phone bill every month, but I guess it makes sense. I would have a 3G connection and would be consuming more data. OK, whatever. I’d be getting a better service for more money.

So when this was announced it took me a couple of days to convince myself that I would pay $10 more a month and then got used to the number. And then, MG Siegler at VentureBeat blew the lid off the iPhone hype (at least in my mind) by reading the small print. The 200 text messages that used to be included are now $5 extra, and without buying at least a 200 text bundle or if you go over 200, it costs $0.20 per message. That’s $0.20 to send and receive.

What? Why is that? Is the price of SMS tied to the price of oil or something? Why all of the sudden is it more expensive for them to process SMS? Why would they do this out of the blue? Oh yea, it’s because AT&T is an evil corporation that will gouge you simply because they can.

Their idea of customer service is holding a gun to your head and telling you to pay up. Can you imagine what it would be like if people actually liked their carrier? And every month you would draw smiley faces in the zeros when you made out your checks to them? With AT&T, when you get your bill it’s like they are sending you a ransom note every month: “Pay up or your social life gets it!”

MG’s post didn’t get nearly enough attention from the blogosphere, but a few weeks after his post, Nicholas Deleon at CrunchGear calculated that since SMS is just 160 bits of data, at the current price plan for iPhone users, AT&T’s text messages cost $1,310 per megabyte. Ridiculous.

There is this AIM app workaround for iPhone users that doesn’t always work and is kind of clumsy, or there is chat on the Facebook app, but none of those are as convenient as SMS. I guess for the foreseeable future, we are stuck with the Short Message Scam. Maybe I’ll just jailbreak my current iPhone and find another carrier who at least pretends to care…

In closing, I’d like to send the following text message to whomever is in charge of AT&T’s pricing structure (probably Dick Cheney or Satan):

OMG U R TOTALLY AN A-HOLE. THAT WAS WORTH THE 20 CENTS IT COST TO SEND

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Succinctly put, Mike!