Expose the Texting Scheme

It is a telltale sign that a new technology is here to stay when it ends a politician’s career. The reel-to-reel tapes that sank Nixon may be relics today, but e-mail and instant messaging scandals have been shaking up the White House and Congress for years, and there could be no Spitzer downfall without mobile phone recordings or online banking records. Just last month, another new medium won legitimacy as evidence of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s alleged affair with his Chief of Staff was exposed via text messages.

But this incident only confirms a trend long in arriving. Text message usage has exploded since 2000, with 2.3 trillion messages projected to be sent worldwide in 2008, and America is only one of the smaller markets.

What most customers don’t realize is the text messaging industry is a cash cow for cell operators, and few understand how cheap text messages should rightfully be. It would not be an exaggeration to call text messages the biggest racket in telecom history.

From a technical standpoint, flashy digital cameras and color iPods have set the bar so high for consumer gadgetry that spending, on average, 11 cents to send each text-only message seems absurd. The Short Message Service (SMS) protocol, a technology from the 1980s which still accounts for nearly all cell phone text messaging, has no formatting and a limit of 160 characters. Entering messages requires painstaking key pecking, and received messages can come out of order. Yet rather than dismiss it as backwards, most users see text messaging as a godsend and fail to appreciate it for the terrible rip-off it truly is.

Among youth, part of this phenomenon stems from the fact that the person using the text messages is often not the one who sees the bill. Were they to take a closer look, most students would realize that not only are the messages overpriced, but the current system sets prices unfairly.

One particularly egregious element of the standard pricing scheme is the charge for receiving messages. All messages are charged twice, typically at a rate of 10 cents for the sender and five for the receiver, though receivers can pay as high as 25 cents. Worse, since the recipient has no choice to accept or reject an incoming message, cell phone users can be billed for receiving spam.

In addition, the price of a text message—even when using a plan—is astronomically greater than the cost to the cell phone carrier. Studies have shown that cell operators have a profit margin of about 90 percent for text messages, which is more than twice the profit for phone calls. Costs to operators are miniscule because SMS technology is over 20 years old and the network bandwidth taken up by text messages is tiny relative to a phone call. With usage increasing, the big players in the telecom industry don’t have to collude to keep raising prices. Verizon recently announced prices as high as 20 cents for users without a pricing plan.

Carriers also use underhanded tactics to profit off of text messaging. For example, many carriers promote their text messages heavily but set the default limit for new customers unrealistically low, hoping that many will surpass it and rack up huge additional fees in their first month. What’s especially frustrating is that using text messages is hard to avoid. Even if carriers didn’t make it difficult, if not impossible, to call and disable the feature, friends serve as the biggest exit barrier. People who send a text message expect another back in reply, especially during lectures or movies where talking is taboo.

So what options remain for concerned consumers? Insist on making phone calls rather than send text messages when possible, and encourage friends to do the same. In addition, customers can call their cell phone operator and demand that they be able to disable or screen text messages. Eventually, operators will be forced to offer cheap text messages to keep their dissatisfied customers.

But even if text messages become fairly priced, you might want to stick to phone calls. Your thumbs will thank you.

Adam R. Gold ’11, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Canaday Hall.