Re:Why AT&T Killed Google Voice
by dkersten on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @04:23AM
(#772330)
Maybe for the radio part of it, but between cell tower and service center (and vice versa), SMS goes over the signaling links - which are also used for call setup, notifications, WAP push, and routing queries.
Theres nothing free about them, theres no such a thing as free in the telco world - everything costs someone something, though I agree, SMS is extremely cheap for the carrier - definitely NOT worth paying 20 cent for. Carriers love SMS for that exact reason.
Having said that, SMS can also cause the carrier a world of pain... I obviously can't provide any details, but one specific network had a problem where two thirds of all signaling traffic was caused by some virus which a large percentage of their customers' phones were infected with. This was costing them many thousands a day! Thankfully, we were able to block these messages at an early stage in the transaction and reduce network traffic by a substantial amount and over the air traffic by about half.
Re:Why AT&T Killed Google Voice
by a-priori on Wednesday August 19, 2009 @05:19AM
(#772392)
They are essentially free, because the carriers provide no delivery guarantees for SMS messages. That is, if the channel is busy with other signalling traffic, then SMS messages will be silently dropped.
Theres nothing free about them, theres no such a thing as free in the telco world - everything costs someone something, though I agree, SMS is extremely cheap for the carrier - definitely NOT worth paying 20 cent for. Carriers love SMS for that exact reason.
Having said that, SMS can also cause the carrier a world of pain... I obviously can't provide any details, but one specific network had a problem where two thirds of all signaling traffic was caused by some virus which a large percentage of their customers' phones were infected with. This was costing them many thousands a day! Thankfully, we were able to block these messages at an early stage in the transaction and reduce network traffic by a substantial amount and over the air traffic by about half.