General

SMS: A Scam?

Tech Crunch is reporting that rumors are running rampant in the mobile phone market over a price plan cut for the always popular iPhone on AT&T. As it stands now, an unlimited date package for the particular handset is $30, and a price cut to $20 may be in the cards. But as Tech Crunch highlights in their report, where mobile carriers seem to make the most money is on packages for the very popular text messaging technology. So would a price cut on unlimited data really be that much of a price cut?

Ever since the launch of the iPhone 3G, AT&T has been fleecing customers with text messaging fees. With the first version of the iPhone, users at least got to send 200 text messages for free with their unlimited data plans. With the iPhone 3G’s updated date plan (which was still just as “unlimited” but with faster download speeds), AT&T cut out all free texts and made users pay at least $5-a-month, unless they wanted to pay the utterly ridiculous $0.20 per text. So basically, that was AT&T jacking up the price of the iPhone plans by at least $5 right there. And many people, myself included, use way more than 200 messages, so it’s more like an extra $15-$20-a-month for either 1500 messages or unlimited messages. Again, a joke when we’re already paying for an “unlimited” data plan.