‘Telecommunications’

In part one, I discussed the rampant texting habits of teenagers today and the rapidly rising cost of same.

The deceptive part of the text messaging phenomenon is that the cost is discussed in terms of a nickel here, a dime there, which makes it seem trivial. It’s not.

Wireless providers are collecting forty cents (they double-bill, hitting both the sender and receiver) to transfer a few lines of text. Sam at Gthing did the math to put this into perspective: if your internet bandwidth were charged at the same rate as text messages, downloading a single MP3 would cost about $24,000.*

This is why SMS is worth 100 billion dollars a year, and growing exponentially.

So what if you’re not a teenager, and you’re trying to keep your cell phone bill from skyrocketing? Here are a few suggestions:

• Get a smaller plan and stick to it. $5 will get you 200 messages from AT&T, 250 messages from Verizon, 300 from Sprint, and 400 from T-Mobile.
• Use email to send texts for free (but remember that the receiver will still be charged). T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint offer free web interfaces as well.
• Switch to a smaller carrier with lower rates.

Smaller companies aren’t rushing to hike SMS rates as quickly as the Big Four. I sampled four, all of which had better per-message deals:

• Alltel charges 15¢ to send and receive domestic messages. Alltel is the only wireless carrier large enough to have been rated along with the Big Four in Consumer Reports’ last study, where they outranked every other carrier in the metro areas for which CR had adequate survey data.
• Virgin Mobile, while arguably not small, is definitely an underdog in the current US market. They offer domestic text messages for 10¢ each way, international for 20¢ sent and 10¢ received.
• US Cellular charges 20¢ to send, but received messages are free.
• Cellular South charges 15¢ to send and receive, capped per month at $30.

(Photo by bigdiesel.)

* Calculations assume the average text message is 80 characters (the range is 1-160) and the average song is about 4 megabytes.

If you have a teen in your house, you’re likely already aware of what I’m about to tell you: this texting thing is way out of control.

We have a fifteen-year-old. Nearly every conversation Jak and I have with her involves a variation of the phrase, “Michaela, put your phone away and listen to me.” She can send five text messages in the time it takes me to utter half a sentence. Of course, you may have noticed that pithiness is not my strong suit, whereas her messages may be only five or six characters long and contain minimal semantic content. But still, the sheer volume is … impressive.

We didn’t buy her a cell phone. Jak and I discussed it, but I’d read a lot of stories about teens and their shockingly high texting bills. My position was that we could gift her a phone but she would first have to be prepared to pay her own phone bill — we weren’t going to add her to ours.

Unfortunately, this decision was trumped by grandparents, who provided Michaela with a cell phone and a line on their own plan. I cringed, but chose not to fight the fait accompli. Sure enough, she blew through her allotted 400 messages and started racking up the extra per-text charges to the tune of $50 per month. After a couple months of this, the grandparents put their foot down: control it or lose the phone.

I thought this would be a good time for Michaela to learn an economic lesson, but this was foiled again when she talked her mother into getting her a new, cooler phone and switching her to her mom’s plan. Mom, being at least one step ahead of the grandparents, signed Michaela up for unlimited text messaging, for which Michaela is supposed to reimburse her each month. I hear the reimbursement isn’t going so well, but at least she’s not racking up several dollars a day on overage.

Which brings us to this news: wireless companies have noticed the teen obsession with texting and are responding by … raising the price. When Michaela was spending about an extra $50 per month last year, that was at .10 per message. Since then Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon have all doubled their rates to .20. Now T-Mobile is quietly informing its customers that as of August 29, they will follow suit. Here’s a table comparing current rates (with T-Mobile’s upcoming increase indicated):

¹ Includes Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, & Virgin Islands

² Includes Canada

This doesn’t even cover photo and video messaging, which are invariably more expensive. If you have a teen on your shared plan, there’s really only one option: get a flat-rate unlimited text package. Here are the offerings from the Big Four wireless companies:

• Sprint: $20/month unlimited
• AT&T: $20/month unlimited
• Verizon doesn’t currently offer a true unlimited plan; for $20/month they’ll give you unlimited messages to other Verizon customers, and 5000 for everyone else. (If you can’t imagine anyone texting that much, you should read this article.)
• T-Mobile: $15/month unlimited. No official word yet on whether this will rise in August to $20 as well, but I would be shocked if it didn’t.

Of course, you could try to enforce a hard limit on text messages with your teen, but be prepared for a pitched battle if you do. If ours is any indication, the suggestion that one stop texting will be received much like the suggestion that one stop breathing.

In part two, I’ll discuss some options for those of us with more reasonable texting habits, along with some scary text message statistics.

(Photos by Sarah R and williamhartz.)