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> SMS is effectively piggybacking on the signals your phone sends out to find which towers are available This argument bugs me. The phone-to-tower is only a p
by mcpherrinm 14y ago
> SMS is effectively piggybacking on the signals your phone sends out to find which towers are available
This argument bugs me. The phone-to-tower is only a portion of the infrastructure: You have to get those messages somewhere after that. But the rest of that infrastructure isn't any more interesting than email.
So I'm not disagreeing with the point that SMS is overpriced (especially without a plan). I doubt you could convince anybody to spend $10/month on "unlimited email".
- kyrias 14y agoAnd then you also have to pay other carriers to deliver SMS to their custemers.
- rurounijones 14y agoWhen SMS first exploded in popularity back in the day a friend of mine worked at BT (British Telecom) and pointed out that the entire network's SMS traffic was handled by 3 mid-range sun sparc servers. Since SMS was originally designed to use management channels it was already built into the general infrastructure, they just needed to up the server count to 3. SMS was (and maybe still is?) almost pure profit for at least BT and I imagine other carriers.