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Munkeh111 on 09 April 2012
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famousringo said:
Munkeh111 said:
Scoobes said:
In the modern era of smartphones, it's a total scam. It used to be quite a useful service, but there are suitable alternatives now.

There are suitable alternatives, but only if everyone you want to contact has the app, and given most of my friends have dumb phones, texting is a lot easier


Exactly. You're paying money to access a network. A very extensive network that almost everybody has access to. It's very powerful to be able to send a near-instant message to almost anybody with a phone.

Voice is not a complete substitute. It's often more expensive to deliver a message over voice (despite how profitable text plans are), often slower (think of how much time you spend waiting for the other end to pick up, exchanging pleasantries, going off topic),  and more likely to interrupt whatever the recipient is doing.

Texts are a massive profit generator for carriers, true, but people wouldn't keep paying for them if they weren't a valuable service. Your professor who refuses to pay for such a service is limiting his communications tools. Maybe he doesn't need another another communication channel, but that doesn't make the rest of us suckers for paying for a cheaper, faster, and more courteous way to send a short message.

I totally agree, but I just don't think you understand how to do phone calls. I phone, say what I want to say, say goodbye, none of this pleasantry rubbish! (it is probably why 200 mins per month is more than plenty)

I don't actually think texts are a very big profit generator, but maybe the difference is US vs UK. Here, it is fairly standard to get unlimited texts with any reasonable contract, I think they have just got so competitive, and they are moving onto data charges (though even then, they encourage wi-fi use because of too great a burden being put on the network)