Word: phoning
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...