<div class="gmail_quote"><div>I did not know they charge you extra for SMS in the US, since SMS is the data transfers that happens between pressing the 'call' button and the connection to the other phone (actually SMS was a hack found out by Nokia people back in the '90's)
<br><br>But over here in the Netherlands we have a fair-use policy on almost any mobile thing:<br><br>unlimited GPRS: one provider states: max 3x the average of all other users, another one: after 50MB of traffic we will call you to stop using GPRS (this is per month)
<br>unlimited SMS: 1000 SMS messages.<br><br>That's why we need both over here, so you can split your data usage.<br><br><br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
0.10 to send and $0.01 to receive. The point is, SMS costs them next<br>to nothing - it's so little data. A voice call is much more<br>data-intensive and requires real-time performance. Yet they give us<br>hundreds of minutes of voice usage (which my wife and I never use even
<br>half of) for one price and then charge extra for tiny little SMS<br>packets. If you are a teenager sending dozens of SMS's per day it<br>adds up. And unlimited GPRS (aka TZones) is $5.95, so with the Neo<br>(someday) I'd rather use jabber. There could be a jabber server which
<br>acts as an SMS gateway, in case you try to send a message to someone<br>who's not connected to jabber. Then at least you don't pay the fee to<br>send the message, and the recipient phone doesn't pay to receive
<br>either as long as it is also connected.<br><br>But I wonder how they would react if some phones started staying<br>connected to GPRS all the time (but not necessarily using much<br>bandwidth).<br><br>I remember reading once that somebody had implemented TCP over SMS, in
<br>case you have the opposite problem. :-) (unlimited SMS and expensive<br>GPRS)<br><br></blockquote></div>