Word: text
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...this incident only confirms a trend long in arriving. Text message usage has exploded since 2000, with 2.3 trillion messages projected to be sent worldwide in 2008, and America is only one of the smaller markets...
...What most customers don’t realize is the text messaging industry is a cash cow for cell operators, and few understand how cheap text messages should rightfully be. It would not be an exaggeration to call text messages the biggest racket in telecom history...
...From a 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...
...Among youth, part of this phenomenon stems from the fact that the person using the text messages is often not the one who sees the bill. Were they to take a closer look, most students would realize that not only are the messages overpriced, but the current system sets prices unfairly...
...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...