SMS now the equivalent of HP printer ink...
SMS costs are starting to piss me off, that's for sure.
I actually started wondering what the data transmission costs were the other day when perusing my bill. Made me think of the comparisons of HP printer ink and Dom Perignon that I remeber seeing a while back. Of course not a valid comparison, but it does make you think about how badly you are getting shafted.
When I first started with SMS support, it cost $.02 to recieve a message - and I didn't mind getting dinged a few pennies. Verizon has been raising that, and just bumped it to $.20. Ouch. I don't see any justification for an increase in costs.
It's been a bad time for my wife to suddenly discover this feature of her phone...
I suspect this is to try to force people into service upgrades, so even the occasional user is having to pay $10-15 a month per phone more to get on a plan that includes TXT, or get dinged per message at the exorbanant rate. They also just took away the $5/month SMS add-on that would have been good for the occasional user - so the minimum upgrade is $10/month/phone, some options run more.
And to upgrade both phones on my plan level to include unlimited TXT will take the monthly base nut from $70 to $100, a 43% increase for the ability to send a bunch of short illegible messages to other phones. Not a great deal, but I may be forced into it.
I even went as far as starting to shop around for other carriers, but they all had pretty much the same deal. No collaboration in a competitive market, right?