Re: Spam
From: Tim Bradshaw (tfb_at_cley.com)
Date: 01/22/04
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Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004 17:52:09 +0000
* Hannah Schroeter wrote:
> Especially, it costs *much* money in the usual pricing schemes here
> in Germany, often 19 Euro-cent per message, for that, I can have up
> to more than 6 minutes of voice connection from the mobile phone to a
> local wire phone destination, or 1 minute to a mobile phone except
> on business hours - and you can have much interaction in 1 minute
> of telephoning! That makes SMS near to useless for me, especially
> as replying costs that money, too, while replying to what I say
> in a phone call doesn't cost the other side additional money.
I think it's fairly clear that SMS is overpriced at present, yes. I
think when I first had a (prepay) mobile it was something like 4p a
message, and it's now 12p. This is especially amazing since it's
unbelievably cheap to send - SMS essentially is sent in the metadata
that would normally be involved in a voice call. And of course it
doesn't have any of the real-time constraints that voice does, so it
can be sent in the times when the network is otherwise idle.
I think the reason for this is fairly clear - mobile companies have
enormous financial problems (no one wants 3G), and SMS is terribly
popular, so they can crank up the costs to keep themselves afloat.
What will happen at some point, in the UK anyway, is that one of the
operators will go under, and someone will buy their infrastructure and
can then move to a reasonable pricing structure, since their enormous
debts will have been written off. This will, of course, bankrupt the
other operators fairly rapidly...
Curiously, although my partner and I have phone tariffs which include
nearly 2 hrs of off-peak calls a day to each other in total, we still
use SMS a whole lot (though not like lots of people do). One issue is
that it's non-intrusive - you can read and answer an SMS later, which
you can't do for a phone call (well, you can do the whole voicemail
nightmare...)
Now, what does this have to do with Lisp...
--tim
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