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1. It is free to receive SMS in ALL countries, except the US. Most operators only charge for sending, they can be inclined in your plan or you can opt for cheaper bundles.
2. With the US mobile numbering scheme senders cannot discriminate from a fixed line from a mobile.
3. There is legislation in front of Congress, which they will address after the beginning of the year to stop US mobile operators from charging users to receive SMS. The operators are allowing free email-to-sms gateways to spam their customers, since the operators make money by charging a recipient.
4. Twitter cannot change the billing model of 3.3 Billion users on the planet. Twitter who???
SMS is expected to double in the coming years. It is cheap. It works and you can communicate with 3.3 Billion devices --- The PC can’t match that.
BTW, the US was the last country to deploy universal SMS in the world. The first country to allow SMS from GSM to CDMA was Telstra in Australia in 2001.
Why not to add this as an option, btw? Gazillion of "free" online SMS services already do that with some success... it would probably work for some users.
There's no free lunch out there, folks :)
Carriers won't kill SMS, but phones with IM and Twitter clients and always on, unmetered 3G connections will. It's just a matter of time.
I understand that all-inclusive data plans are ubiquitous yet, especially in Europe, but they will be at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Just because something is widespread now doesn't mean it will be in 10 years at the rate technology, especially mobile technology is expanding. 10 years ago everyone I know didn't have a cellphone, they had a pager.
The whole 'SMS isn't much data so it should be free' argument is frankly pretty stupid. You don't argue that the marginal cost of a DVD is $0.05, and therefore no DVD should sell for more than that, do you? Mobile operators have a very real and substantial cost base to cover, and it is inane to try to cherry-pick parts of their price plan and argue about the unerlying cost of delivering this or that option.
To be able to benefit fully from all Twitter offers, one must possess a rather above-average mobile phone, yet another obstacle for mainstream usage until current gadgety mobile become cheap enough.
And of course operators won't kill SMS service which is a major cash flow income for many.
All in all, Twitter is so far a niche appealing to tech audience and in my opinion far from challenging SMS especially in developing parts of the world.
I think a lot of times people have difficulties looking past the present, so I'll repeat. Think of where we were in 1998 with mobile technology. In 2018 do you really think we're going to be paying 20 cents to send 160 characters? No.
This isn't really an SMS question - its a segmentation question. MNOs are trying to segment their service according to value rather than raw network capacity measures that consumes don't care about. This isn't entirely foolish - 160 bits as an SMS is worth more to me than 160 bits as part of a 5 meg video. Sure, over time HSPA and LTE will lower the cost level on all of these services, but you will ultimately have to continue contributing a certain average ARPU if you want the networks to exist.
Back to Twitter: They do get kick back from the mobile phone companies or hope to be aquired by them - this does requier that they do get a footprint in that ecosystem (not really going to happen) or that they make money otherwhise.
From early on many people have said that they would pay some amount of money to have certain features and I am sure DM via SMS is one of them - at a decent price. They may not want to go through that process of billing and such but I dont see (other than with advertising) how that should work.
What twitter's action and this post shows is how little US companies and pundits really understand about the mobile phone market in the rest of the world.
It's time to go back to that policy. Today mobile operators have created a "strategic" hell with seperate plans and internal P&L's for minutes used talking, lbs, text and data plans.
This hell is not what consumers want or need for the rapid adoption of these tools to occur.
http://twitter.com/dalka
The world does not revolve around twitter, or twitter users, or silicon valley for that fact.
Since the dawn of time, some gah gah eyed hero reporter or entrepreneur has tried to play the david vs. goliath game of trying to dis intermediate the carriers, or kill their way of doing business:
NEWSFLASH the carriers built their own networks. It cost billions to buy the spectrum and operate those things. Their sole responsibility is to their consumers - that means the mass consumers, not the loud 0.1% that use twitter.
If the founders of twitter didn't realize this would be the obvious end result of their exercise, they shouldn't have ever started to give this stuff out for free.