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. "

First post??

[phantomfive]

Hmmmm nobody seems to be very interested in this story. I can see why, the text of the story itself is enough to put someone to sleep. A long blog entry in small type with no pictures, and not especially interesting anyway.

People text until they have to start paying for text messages, then they don't text so much. Is this really surprising? College students and high schoolers text more often. That's about it.

US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[zanderredux]

I, for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive. I read somewhere that it had to do with technical limitations around billing systems and that it just became like that by tradition (or because US law made it impossible to reverse it)

Clearly, who makes the call is the party who has the necessity to communicate, not the receiving end. Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Z80xxc!]

Quite simply because they want more money. Charge them sending and receiving and you get twice as much.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[mah!]

for the life of me, cannot understand why in the US telecom users get billed for stuff they receive.

hear, hear. [slashdot.org]
Not only this, but this mechanism of paying for 'airtime' on received calls, just as for received SMSes, is so engrained in most cellphone users minds that they'll strenuously defend its 'logic' (excessive use of quotes intended).

It'd be just as bizzarre to charge the receiving party for a long distance phone call. Yet apparently cellphone users accept it, just as they accept the absurd incompatibility between GSM and CDMA (good thing TDMA got scrapped at least) as inevitable side-effect of a 'free market' (yup, there are those quotes again).
Funnily enough, there are very few [wikipedia.org] other countries around the world who charge cellphone users for receiving an SMS or a cellphone call... of course, <sarcasm> this is because of GSM's anti-capitalistic approach </sarcasm>.

"Internet Sociologist"

[gowen]

Internet Sociologist? That's not a real job.

Re:Why do texts cost much anyway?

[NickNameCreateAccoun]

No load? Please do visit a european country on new years eve, basically all service is out between 23.30-01.00 Just because of the "no load" sms.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

And this I think is the reason for the differences between the US billing system and the European billing system: In the US you don't know whether you call a cell phone, in Europe (well, at least in all countries I know the system) you know it's a cell phone by the prefix.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Kadin2048]

It's quite simple. For a 'dialer pays' system to work, you need to know that a number is a mobile instead of a landline. That means giving out mobile numbers that are different from landline numbers.

That's just not how the U.S. system involved. When the first cellphones came out, the networks were operated by the local/regional telephone companies, and they gave out local telephone numbers for them, from the blocks they had been assigned, just like any other line. (In fact, getting a local number was pretty important, so that people calling you wouldn't have to pay long distance, and neither would you when you called them -- early AMPS plans frequently didn't have unlimited long distance.)

No regional cell operator was in a position to offer nationwide service early on, and there frankly just wasn't that much top-down coordination driving the process (and why should there have been? they were expensive toys for rich people). I doubt that the switching system could have handled a national cellular prefix or area code without a huge overhaul, anyway. That's just not how it was designed. Combined with the fact that there just aren't enough available area codes in the U.S. POTS namespace to give every current area code a secondary 'mobile area code,' and there's just not a feasible way to do dialer-pays.

Plus, I think dialer-pays plans in the U.S. would have held back the adoption of cellphones significantly. One of the reasons people liked cellphones was that it gave you a real, regular local phone number, which happened to be mobile. The calling party never had to know it was mobile. Really, what the U.S. system boils down to is "convenience pays." If you want the convenience of a mobile, you pay for it. The caller just pays for the landline call to wherever the area code that the number is located in, the person with the cell pays for the airtime over the cell network. I think this is pretty fair, actually, and judging by how quickly cellphones became popular, I think a lot of other people did, too. (Also: the only dialer-pays extra-fee numbers in the U.S. are the "1-900" numbers [wikipedia.org], and they're generally regarded as pretty sleazy; the domain of phone-sex operators and psychics, mostly. Not the sort of thing you want your budding technology associated with.)

In short, a caller-pays system just would not have been feasible in the U.S. given how the system developed, and I think if the issue had been forced, bad things (including a delay in uptake of the technology or consumer rejection) could have resulted. There are fundamental differences between the cellular market in the U.S. and Europe (which stem, in not insignificant part, from the fact that European phone systems were still a lot more centralized during the inception of cellular service than the U.S. was), and I don't think there's really any reason to assume that what works in one place is necessarily the best everywhere. The European system may seem conceptually more consistent, but the U.S. system allows for no-change number portability from landlines to cells, and makes cell lines 'equal' for a caller to a traditional landline.

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Yer Mom]

I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay extra for what device someone else is using.

Well, I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay to receive a call when I didn't even ask the caller to make it. Particularly a problem with SMS, as you can't even look at the CLI and hit Reject.

Roll on free universal wi-fi. Then we can just use SIP and the IM clients of our choice :)

Re:US telecoms are quite... peculiar

[Invidious]

This is absurd. Landline systems are obsolete. Yes! Obsolete! I live in Finland and I must say that there are no practical reasons for this 'equality'.

The landline -- good old copper-pair wiring -- is not obsolete. Sure, your cellphone is convenient, and possibly cheaper. But what happens when something happens that wipes out the transmission network? What happens if you lose power for a week and you only had a couple bars of battery left when the power goes?

The reason that landlines aren't obsolete is dependability. You practically never lose phone service to a real copper landline unless a tree's come down in your neighborhood -- and even then, the lines may work. The land-line network practically never gets jammed from too much traffic. I've never had a dropped call. I can run a line and get service anywhere in my house, even the basement.