The Cultures of Texting In Europe and America

Ponca City, We Love You writes "The cultures of text messaging are very different in Europe and North America, according to an internet sociologist named Danah Boyd. Americans and Canadians have historically paid to receive text messages, but 'all-you-can-eat' data plans are beginning to change that. All-you-can-eat plans are still relatively rare in Europe. When a European youth runs out of texts and can't afford to top up, they simply don't text. But they can still receive texts without cost so they aren't actually kept out of the loop. What you see in Europe is a muffled fluidity of communication, comfortable but not excessive. "

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[phantomfive]

OK, text messages are one thing, but paying extra to CALL a cell phone just sucks. How do you know if you are calling a cell phone? You don't, until you get the bill at the end of the month. So then you have to keep track of who has a cell phone and who doesn't, and when you want to borrow someone else's phone, they always ask, "are you going to call a cell phone?" No way. Let the person who has the cell phone worry about if it is more expensive for them or not.

That was my feeling after living in a place where the caller had to pay extra to call a cell phone. Your feelings may be different. But I doubt it.

Mobile numbers have a distinct prefix here!

[_merlin]

In most countries you can tell whether a call is to a mobile or not from the number, and you can decide whether you want to pay to call a mobile. For example in Australia, mobile numbers start with 04, and in China mobile numbers start with 13. If a non-mobile number is forwarded to a mobile number, the owner of the forwarded number pays the mobile call rate (as opposed to the caller or the receiver).

Re:First post??

[slimey_limey]

It's not that nobody is here. Thing is, the story was retroposted by something exceeding two hours.

Re:Mobile numbers have a distinct prefix here!

[RowanS]

And also most mobile phone tariffs in Australia now charge the same rate to call a mobile or fixed line anywhere in the country, so it doesn't really matter.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[Cyberax]

Actually, no.

SMS messages use GSM control channels, not the main voice/data channels. Even worse, SMS messages compete for bandwidth with the other service messages (like 'make a call'). So too many SMS messages can easily crash operator's networks.

Re:Whoever came up with texting...

[Anonymous Coward]

No genius there. It was a Finnish mobile network engineer who proposed it for maintenance purposes. Nobody really planned that it would be a big hit.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[lazy_playboy]

Believe it. At 00:00 01/01, in Europe everyone texts everyone and the resulting 2 hour mobile outage is a right pain in the arse.
As many others have said, SMS uses the control channel which has much less bandwidth and chokes very easily, and also affects voice call functions, even if there's plently of bandwidth free on the voice channel.

SMS wasn't designed for the daily usage that we're seeing today - it was more of a 'hmmm, we'll add this function in as an after thought, but no one's really gonna use it much, are they?'

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[grotgrot]

The reason is because the US does not use dedicated area codes for cellphones like most other countries do. Consequently as a caller you cannot tell the difference between calling someone's home phone vs calling someone's cell phone as they will have the same area code. Conceptually the reason why you have to pay for incoming calls is because the call goes to your home area via conventional means, and then goes by radio to your phone. You have to pay for that last radio hop. (Of course it doesn't really work like this now, but that is how it all started). This also means that you don't get charged extra to call a cellphone as happens in many other countries.

US consumer psychology is also very different. Historically US consumers have always preferred fixed bills versus variable bills, even though many would save money with variable bills. This is the reason that local phones calls are free - the cost is fixed, not actually free. The Internet also took off here early on because of that - plans were almost entirely fixed cost. For cell phones, everyone fixates on the plan with how many bundled minutes it includes (fixed cost). Competition has led to voice minutes being underpriced, so the carriers ding on other services such as data, SMS, sending/receiving picture messages etc. Some carriers (Verizon Wireless) go so far as deliberately crippling features in phones they sell so that the only way to do various things is via them, for a charge. (And in general phones are carrier locked in the US, and cannot be used with another carrier even if unlocked, or can but with significantly reduced functionality). Verizon even went so far as making SMS messages very expensive if you don't buy a bundle to encourage people to sign up for bundles they mostly don't use fully. To put things in perspective, a text message consumes about as much bandwidth as one tenth of a second of voice, but is typically charged the same as 60 to 90 seconds of voice.

Apologies for not being able to cite the consumer preferences for fixed billing source. A story was posted on /. several years about the research paper, but I haven't been able to find it again.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[dascritch]

I'm in France and before the launching of the GSM, we had a analogue radiotelephone system (commercial name was "Radiocom 2000"). In the beginning of the 1990s, my father got one in his car, and the number he had was a local one (attached to our town, namely was beginning in 61, latter, with new numbering plan, it would be 05 61, or "geographical" when starting with 01-05). People who called him where paying a "normal" price (the monopolistic france telecom were running very excessive tarrifs at this moment), and he was charged of the price difference. Because of the local number he was allocated, the consumer was believing his call charged as a landline one. With the new numbering system, the "06" prefix was attached to mobile operations, pagers (still some), analogue, and the brand new GSM systems with a public (Itineris, aka France Telecom, finally named Orange) and a private operator (SFR). That prefix (and the ones like "08" for premium charged rates) are differently charged because they are not "geographic numbers". And so, GSM are not billed when they receive calls, but their correspondents are paying more, because they know that "06" is a mobile line. When "triple play" FAI started their box (namely, Free.fr, with internet, tv, and phone), the new phone line you got from their modem had a 087x number attributed. A very big problem, because Free was advertising that their number have a local tarrif everywhere they are called, but France Telecom (historical operator, still proprietary of all the landlines, concurrent with the Wanadoo/Orange brand) was attributing thoses numbers until 1998 the premium numbers. Because of the exploding demand onto these boxes, and to stop the confusion, since last years, all "degrouped" lines via triple-play FAI, have now 09 prefix. Don't think that Orange is raging about that : now they're happy because they hotlin have less angry phonecalls about inconsistent billings...

Cheap unlimited data in Europe

[jholster]

More and more phones are data-enabled, but only the techno-elite are going to add such ridiculously costly plans. (And what on earth can you do with only 4MB?) It's pretty clear that the carriers do not actually want you to use data. The story is even scarier in Europe with no unlimited options.

Not true. I pay 10 eur per month for unlimited 384 kbps 3G data in Finland. Even unlimited 2 Mbps costs no more than ~30 eur per month. Pretty cheap I think, and this is common price level in Finland.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[mah!]

You can't send SMS to landlines in the US?

Mostly not. Amazing eh?
There was no teletext [wikipedia.org] either. (not that the two are related technologies)

Lack of standards in both cases I guess... from wikipedia: "Adoption in the United States was hampered due to a lack of a single teletext standard and consumer resistance to the high initial price of teletext decoders."
The same place which finally produces a reasonable unlimited data plan [att.com] can't seem to offer simple data services such as landline SMSes as standard.
Ah well, pros and cons of living in different places around the globe.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[xpiotr]

It depends on the implementation.
There is no Quality of Service connected to sending SMS,
so if there is a flood of SMS coming,
the operator normally caches them and send them at a conveniant time.
Or just throw them, since the is no QoS connected.

A little like when the postman gets tired of carrying your letters and throws some of them.

US Cellular?

[5of0]

I don't know about the rest of the providers, but my US provider (US Cellular) has free incoming everything - texts, phone calls, picture messages - by default on all its plans. And unlimited outgoing texting is $15 a month (picture messaging is something extra). I guess they're the odd ones out?

Re:First post??

[foobsr]

The font size is normal.

Last time I checked 'x-small' was not considered normal.

CC.

Re:First post??

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlimited texting plans in America seem to be around $20/mo and individual messages are about 15 cents (so one message plus the recipient replying to you will cost each of you 30 cents for a total of 60 cents). How fucking much do you have to be texting in a month to make this worthwhile?

Slightly over two per day (if you count one incoming plus one outgoing as one unit), which is hardly excessive. And I think you're missing the major advantage of SMS - it's not that it's discreet, it's that it's asynchronous.

Re:First post??

[Piazzola]

I can give one good reason: I have a hearing difficulty. Certain people's voices, including that of my ex-girlfriend, are very difficult for me to understand over the phone, so she and I tended to hold long conversations by text message while we were still dating but temporarily away from each other. It was hell on my bill (seeing as I DIDN'T have an unlimited plan) and between what I sent and what I received, we easily got into the thousands of messages.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Captain_Chaos]

The reason is because the US does not use dedicated area codes for cellphones like most other countries do.

That makes perfect sense! Thanks, I'd been wondering the same thing for a long time. In the Netherlands all mobile numbers start with 06, so a caller can alway tell they're calling a mobile number. So receiving mobile calls or text messages is free. Except when the receiver is roaming abroad. The caller may be able to tell they're calling a mobile number, but not that the phone is currently abroad, so the receiver actually pays for the extra cost of being called while roaming. (I don't think that applies to text messages though, those are free to receive even when you're abroad.)