4 ms·
This is just repeating the same old crap that is completely devoid of anything but the most abstract high level concepts of how these things work. I can't clai
by forgotusername 15y ago
This is just repeating the same old crap that is completely devoid of anything but the most abstract high level concepts of how these things work.
I can't claim to be any expert, but I know at least that in GSM a handset must be allocated a dedicated control channel from a limited number of timeslots in the current cell for the duration of an SMS transaction. This happens on the receiving and transmitting ends. In order to establish said channel, the handset is first woken up through paging, which places load on another shared channel.
For each physical frequency, there are only something like 16-24 slots available. For each physical station, there may only be handful of frequencies in use, perhaps only one.
Installation of a base station is not cheap. In a busy metropolitan area with even 100 teenagers getting upset because their SMS failed to go through the first time they tried to send it (and repeatedly pumping send until it finally works), at least make a guess at the math involved for infrastructure costs to support this kind of thing. Don't forget to factor in the load it places on the random paging channels shared with voice signalling (again, more investment in physical frequencies to reduce error rates here).
In short, I wish someone who actually understood this stuff wrote some kind of rebuttal, the rhetoric is clearly at least a few parts bullshit.
Don't try to imagine this using some analogy like tiny UDP packets being spat out on a packet switched network, that's not what these networks look like. Transaction time is on the order of seconds, which requires a "physical" circuit to be setup beforehand.
Yes, sending SMS would be practically free on the Internet, but that's comparing apples to oranges.
- leot 15y agoBut they didn't put the infrastructure up to support SMS. They put it up to support voice calls, primarily.
- elektronaut 15y agoIf it's any indication on the informedness of the article: In reality, an MMS is about one million times more data than a text message. The payload of an SMS is 140 bytes. The MMS specification does not specify a limit, but providers often cap it at 300kb. Which, of course, is about 2000 times more. Now, if an MMS had about a million times more data than a text message, that would make each message about 140 megabytes.
- sorbus 15y agoThe article seems to have updated. It now reads "In reality, an MMS or email is anywhere from a thousand to a hundred thousand times more data than an SMS." Given that the previous paragraph says that it's an "email containing photo(s) and/or video(s)", that seems perfectly reasonable (it puts the range between ~140 KB and ~14 MB).
- vacri 15y agoSending emails with 14MB attachments will make your sysadmin hunt you down with a pitchfork.
- nitrogen 15y agoIf that's the case, your sysadmin either needs to stop living in the past, or provide something more convenient than e-mail. Storage and LAN bandwidth are ridiculously cheap.
- bdunbar 15y agoStorage and LAN bandwidth are ridiculously cheap. This is true right up until you present a req for more disk drives for one's network attached storage.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- bxc 15y agoIf we're making inappropriate price comparisons, that 14mb is half a cent of hard-drive space. A whole 3 characters worth of SMS!
- vacri 15y agoStop living in the past? Sure. The Cloud is the new fad, everyone's talking about it. We have our company email managed in the cloud. LAN bandwidth and local storage has nothing to do with the bottlenecks in this system.
- pyre 15y agoThe price of what unlimited text messages should cost aside, the ala carte pricing of text messages (at least for US cell carriers) is definitely price gouging. It cost (at least at one point) ~25c to receive a text message. And I have received spam text messages. This creates a perverse incentive to the carrier to do nothing to block spammers on their SMS network. Also, my wife has a pay-as-you-go plan and each text that she sends or receives counts as a minute of talk time. I have a hard time believing that setting up circuit from one end of the text to the other takes the same amount of resources as a minute of talk time. Shouldn't a minute of talk time also take up a circuit? Wouldn't a text occupy that circuit for a fraction of a minute?
- WA 15y agoThis, by the way, is specific for the US. In Germany, and I believe in almost any other European country, only the sender pays for SMS and calls. I spent a year in the US and this was something I found quite irritating - being charged for receiving a call.
- kaitnieks 15y agoWait, do you mean both the caller and the answerer pay for the call? Really, aren't you confusing something?
- sethg 15y agoYes, really. American cell-phone plans generally give you a fixed number of calling minutes (plus various other bonuses, such as free calling on nights and weekends), and once you go over the quota, you pay for receiving calls. I just checked out the cheapest individual plan for Verizon in my area, and they charge 45¢ per minute after your allowance is up. I assume they set things up this way because cellphone numbers share the same number space in North America as landline numbers, so if it costs more to maintain a cellphone network, the operator cannot recover those extra costs entirely from people calling into it.
- fertel 15y agoWhile this was true - all the of major US carriers are moving to SMS-IP solutions as they move to 4g.