“At a time when e-mail and many other forms of electronic communication are essentially free, wireless carriers are still charging as much as 20 cents to send a text message to a phone, and another 20 cents to receive it,” Jenna Wortham reports for The New York Times.
MacDailyNews Take: That scam is finally about to die.
“Paying so much to transmit a handful of words is starting to look as antiquated as buying stamps,” Wortham reports. “On Wednesday, Apple plans to introduce a new service called iMessage, which could quickly become the biggest fish in this pond. The service lets iPhone owners send messages with text, photos and video to other iPhone owners over a Wi-Fi or cellular data connection. The service, part of an update to Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, will automatically handle messages sent between iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch [sic] users who have upgraded to the latest software.”
“More than two trillion text messages are sent each year in the United States, generating more than $20 billion in revenue for the wireless industry. Verizon Wireless alone generates as much as $7 billion a year in revenue from texting, or about 12 percent of the total, Mr. Moffett said, and texting brings in about a third of the operating income,” Wortham reports. ” Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo who studies mobile computing, estimates it costs the carriers about a third of a penny to send text messages. Considering that the major carriers charge 10 to 20 cents to send and receive them, ‘it’s something like a 4,090 percent markup,’ he said.”
Read more in the full article here.