Price of a text ...

I thought this thread was going to tie in with some sort of Walter Benjamin / the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction sort of idea...

I never imagined it cost them very much at all, but I didn't realise that even the wireless portion of a text message transmission is basically done for free as part of the communication with the handset. Nice little earner innit.

The US took a little longer to catch on / be suckered into ubiquitous SMS than the UK / Europe didn't it? Why was that?

jambo said:

The US took a little longer to catch on / be suckered into ubiquitous SMS than the UK / Europe didn't it? Why was that?

Click to expand...

I assume that they were a lot slower to pick up on pay as you go phones, and most people had contracts. If these contracts had cheap rates for phone calls, there wasn't the same incentive to use 'cheap' text messages.

Notice how in series 3 of the wire there is a storyline involving cheap pay as you go phones, which when they run out of credit are just binned. The police criticise the phone manufacturers, arguing that their product is making life easier for drug dealers/ terrorists.

Of course the Wire is a work of fiction, so its probably a silly point to make

In Italy and probably other places in Europe you need photo ID to buy a SIM card and it gets registered. Actually something the UK is currently less paranoid about.