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AT&T Simplifying Texting Plans, Enlisting Best Buy in Battle Against Verizon iPhone
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Teeth gnashing...
Why all the teeth gnashing over texting plans on a smart phone? Texting is for kids, email is for adults.
You have free email...use it.
Why purchase a $600 phone to text your sanity away like some 8th grade giggling girl?
admittedly iphones perform poorly in a push email comparison to BlackBerrys but the old Razor-type phones can perform adequately if all you want to do is run your mouth and text all day. Enough already. Just give me Macromedia Flash.
Why all the teeth gnashing over texting plans on a smart phone? Texting is for kids, email is for adults.
You have free email...use it.
Why purchase a $600 phone to text your sanity away like some 8th grade giggling girl?
admittedly iphones perform poorly in a push email comparison to BlackBerrys but the old Razor-type phones can perform adequately if all you want to do is run your mouth and text all day. Enough already. Just give me Macromedia Flash.
Every time I've been in BB to look at phones and just before I upgraded to my iPhone 4, their employees and nothing good to say about the iphone 4. They've always tried to talk me out of it.
not everyone has a smartphone with a data plan and email. i use google voice for free bc i was tired of paying $30/month for my wife and i to have unlimited texting. it's a ripoff.
Also, some people don't check their email immediately even with smartphone.
grow up dude.
Meh, it is no different than IM clients on your computer. I think it is the more or less instant continuation of a thread without the need to open a message and deal with all the other overhead of an email message. None the less, the amount the carriers charge is absolutely insane.
That almost makes sense when you factor in that there is no way to tell which phone numbers are mobile due to the lack of mobile specific area codes. It would be harsh to charge the caller more for ringing a mobile when they don't know it is one.
whoops, sorry about spreading wrong information. my unlimited texting plan is 30 bucks. my sister and i routinely hit 2k.
I hear ya. Why not have "roll-over" texts? I would have like 2000 of them. I mean they have roll over minutes (that expire), why not texts? I have been saying this for years..
Considering that the carriers make most of their money from outrageous charges like this it isn't surprising.
My family's had AT&T since they were PacBell Wireless. There's plenty of people in the same boat, especially from the era when we couldn't port our numbers between carriers.
IIRC, Verizon also charges for tethering. Also, the SIM on the iPad isn't locked.
That's what unlocking your phone and using a local SIM card is for. And since AT&T no longer has exclusivity on the iPhone, that means starting with the iPhone 5, AT&T has to provide an unlock code if you ask for it.
No, Verizon raised ETFs first.
Att should have free mobile to mobile texting like verizon's plans, that would make the 1000/$10 great
Actually you can refuse the text message. You have to go into you account settings on the ST&T website. There you can block text messaging altogether.
I do this and if i have to do SMS I use Google Voice. Personally I hate texts and do email instead.
Wow, that's bad.
I pay £20 ($30) on o2 (UK) for 600 mins, 1200 texts and unlimited data (original iPhone user)
We wish. Where did you get that idea? AFAIK, AT&T never has to provide an unlock code if they don't want to.
Verizon created pro-rated ETFs first, too. However, it took AT&T two years to follow that downward-cost plan. Only took six months to follow the raised ETF. Go figure.
That's not a bad concept.
We'd also have to account for store and forward centers, though. And the whole half-SMS, half-data mess that MMS is.
A problem is that, starting a year or two ago, people now spend more minutes texting than on voice calls. Sometimes during the day carriers are handling millions of texts a minute.
So the carrier infrastructure had to change. Now carriers need more SMS store-and-forward centers, which means real estate to put expensive server farms, with support people and backup power and everything else. It costs.
But here's the worst problem with so much texting, and it's also a national security risk: network paging overload. While SMS centers can be built to accomodate increases in texting, cell tower control channel bandwidth cannot.
As noted previously, texts are like mini phone calls. They require a phone to be paged, the phone to acquire a channel and authenticate itself and the network, and then the text to be sent down to the device...and finally for the device to send back a receipt acknowledgement.
A side complication is the way networks page phones. They don't just use the last cell you connected to. They send the page to a group of cells in that area, in case you've moved around. This increases the control channel usage in more than just one cell.
The upshot is that short message texts are overwhelming networks that also have people trying to make voice calls. It'd almost be better if SMS was removed in favor of data-based IMs, but there's too many dumbphones to do that.
Mobile networks are complicated creatures, with lots of little bandwidth interactions that add up to strange restrictions at times.
You know what would be really innovative, AT&T?
How about letting family plans pool text messages like you let us pool minutes. Between my fiancee and myself, we send/receive 300-400 text messages combined per month. Right now we each have the $5 for 200 message plan which actually works decently well. But for the same cost on your new plan ($10) we could get 1000 messages and feel much less restricted. Right now we have to make a conscious effort to not text each other since we both get dinged for that (what a racket!).
How about letting family plans pool text messages like you let us pool minutes. Between my fiancee and myself, we send/receive 300-400 text messages combined per month. Right now we each have the $5 for 200 message plan which actually works decently well. But for the same cost on your new plan ($10) we could get 1000 messages and feel much less restricted. Right now we have to make a conscious effort to not text each other since we both get dinged for that (what a racket!).
It is all relative. You don't know me but I've had AT&T (with Corp. name changes along the way) since 1985 and have never had an issue.
That's ********.
I have a blackberry for work and get exchange to my iphone, and without fail I receive the email first on my iphone over my blackberry and computer.
Even my immediate exec now has an iphone and only looks at his blackberry when he needs a contact from the monstrous list downloaded to it by IT, otherwise we are both just wearing deadweight on our belts because it was issued.
Yes, because people who text more than x number of texts per month are rightfully idiots.
Cool story bro.