Carriers have been sticking it to their customers for years with SMS fees that bear no relation to the actual cost of providing the service, and they’ve been getting away with it because text messaging is incredibly convenient. If there’s one thing that sparks innovation, though, it’s being ripped off — and free OTT messaging services like WhatsApp were born out of that frustration.
Short Message Service
SMS is a method of sending 160-character text messages via phones. It was developed as a way to send messages over the stripped-down telephone traffic signaling paths when there was no calling going on, rather than take up chunks of bandwidth space like voice does.
Its beauty is that it’s incredibly cheap because it uses hardly any resources, and the resources it does use aren’t required for anything else at the time the message is sent.
SMS is cheap, but you wouldn’t know it based on the per-message fees telcos have been charging for it — particularly when roaming.
How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot
The tide has changed, however, and today apps like WhatsApp are providing text messaging over 3G or WiFi.
Telcos may well tell you they don’t care about the potential SMS revenue loss, because the consumer simply buys an expensive data plan instead of a texting package
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