Nice...

Post #381,453 by folkert 10/1/13 9:03:18 AM Reply	Nice... On past months I have a bad month, I'll get 15,000 texts from my monitoring systems. Cripes, that'd be $6K. Awesome. -- greg@gregfolkert.net "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." --Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Post #381,460 by pwhysall 10/1/13 10:28:44 AM Reply	Wait, what? You pay for incoming texts? Dude. Uncool.
Post #381,467 by folkert 10/1/13 10:59:49 AM Reply	Yep, I used to ... Switch to unlimited data and texts a long while back... Except after 6GB it is throttled. Also only get 2100 minutes to share 'tween 5 phone and a dongle. -- greg@gregfolkert.net "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." --Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Post #381,471 by drook 10/1/13 11:10:27 AM Reply	Not any more, but ... I used to carry a company-issued pager. All of us got notifications whenever our code threw an error. One day someone put an error in a tight loop and had notifications enabled from his dev environment. All our pagers started lighting up. It took over 30 seconds before one of us was able to open it and figure out where it was coming from. "CHRIS! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?!" "Huh? Oh, is that me?" We had to call AT&T and ask them to empty all 13 of our inboxes ... including any "real" messages caught in the crossfire. They ranged from 11k to over 17k per box. And we were supposed to be charged per message. The alternative to having them delete everything would have cost 5 figures. -- Drew
Post #381,480 by jake123 10/1/13 1:09:57 PM Reply	There are people who do here and yeah, it's totally uncool. If you're on PAYG, you pay for incoming texts, or you pop up ten bucks a month for a texting plan. Our regulatory agency on the telecoms here (the CRTC) used to be decent, but nowadays it's a prime example of regulatory capture in Canada: there's a revolving door between it and the executive level people in the telecoms.
Post #381,481 by drook 10/1/13 1:14:09 PM Reply	Refresh my memory The reason texts are 140 characters is that's the amount of bandwidth available in the network ping, so it's essentially free (from a bandwidth perspective) for the telcos, right? -- Drew
Post #381,482 by jake123 10/1/13 1:18:13 PM Reply	No SMS originated as a messaging protocol to carry debugging messages from devices that were being remotely debugged to make sure they worked properly on the cell network. It's a fixed length packet, with a 140 byte payload. You can get 160 characters in it when you use a 7bit char set specifically designed to work with SMS. The engineers working on the devices wrote a little thing into the firmwares to be able to compose messages and send them to other devices, probably so they could troll each other, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Post #381,510 by static 10/2/13 12:33:29 AM Reply	It's what happened because the US was late to GSM. :-) I'm being only partly cynical. But I remember reading somewhere that when the US telcos looked at providing GSM, they noticed what features customers elsewhere in the world made popular and figured out ways to charge for them. We don't pay in AU for incoming calls or texts, either. Wade. Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/

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