Spectrum of Greed

Wireless Revenue Juggernaut

It is past April fools, but I couldn’t resist.  AOL isn’t really charging per IM - but cell phone providers are.  As a means to grasp what is going on in the text messaging world, downloading the song Complication by Nine Inch Nails would cost $9,512.50…if you paid current text message rates of .24 per 140 characters of text sent.  That’s right - IMing on a cell phone generates big bucks!  SMS, or text messaging, is the fastest growing part of the cell phone providers product portfolio, and the least costly to provide.  Compared to downloading music or video, the little text messages barely make a blip on the traffic monitors of internet service providers.  This means BIG margins for those that provide text messaging services.  This explains why in America’s toughest economy in more than a decade, cell phone provider profits were up substantially.  Maybe AIG isn’t the only place that a little outrage should be directed.

Gregg Christofferson, who’s 13 year old daughter Dena sent 10,000 texts to friends in the course of a month and received a similar number, received a shocking bill for $4,756.25.  The total amount of data that was moved by the wireless ISP for this charge?  2.67 Megabytes.  If Comcast or another wired ISP charged this for people using IM, the nation would be outraged.  Dad was understandably outraged, and took his frustration out on his daughters cell phone.  Great headlines for the media to play with, but shouldn’t we look a little harder at these incidents? 

We are all used to hearing the horror stories of people that don’t go on the ‘unlimited text’ plans, so we have little sympathy for what seems like a constant stream of those less enlightened than ourselves who take these gambles with fate.

Let’s get real here for a minute.  The cell phone bill alone is tough to justify for kids these days, but kids want to text more than they want to talk.  The text option is not one that you can just purchase on it’s own.  It is an add on to the voice plan that is the basis for any cell phone contract in the US.  Because of this, many parents walk a thin line between providing the connectivity they need to manage their kids in this over scheduled world, and having to buy the groceries.  Now a few token text messages are thrown into almost any calling plan, but then a hefty per message fee kicks in.

When phones are first provided to teenagers, parents go over the rules, and for a few months, things go well.  Then guess what - normal teenage behavior takes over, they have been using one or two text messages with no bad consequences, and they forget that there is a hidden, horrendous consequence to what they see as completely normal behavior.  So they start sending more messages.

Most kids increase their volume gradually, so there is one nasty bill as their volume crosses the threshold that inevitably serves the parents as a learning process, then the parent that has suffered the ‘behavioral correction’ that the cell phone company provided first to them makes the necessary adjustments - taking the phone away, sometimes using a hammer on it, or in most cases, paying the phone company more money as insurance that the outrageous bill doesn’t happen again.  Hence the rapid growth in data services.

After all, these kids are the computer generation, and they are IMing each other constantly now when they are at home and school.  Text messaging, or SMS, is nothing more than wireless IM.  Well, to most kids that don’t understand the trap set by wireless providers, the desire to send and respond to these instant messages is a powerful driver that doesn’t compare to the fine print in a cell phone contract.

Instead of continuing to accept this market as it exists today, people need to remember they are being chastised for using what was theirs to begin with.  The spectrum that the cell providers use belongs to US citizens.  The FCC leases the air waves to the cell phone companies, or wireless data providers that they have become, who in turn provide consumer services using those airwaves.  The system that serves us today is the one that we voted in.  If we want to see any changes here, we need to let our representatives in Washington know that we should be able to text our kids whenever we want, regardless of whether they have a cell phone contract or not.  And it should not cost us thousands of dollars to do so.