SMS Interconnect Markup in Africa revealed

Shred said:
What about RSA?
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timgaul said:
In many countries, including South Africa, there are no internal interconnect fees for text messages.
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So in other words, they have no excuse for raping us with SMS costs. No fees to charge each other for terminating an SMS, like with voice calls, and the costs are miniscule. Yet the average price is still around 75c per SMS!! :eek: :sick: :sick: :sick:

Is this not collusion!?!?
 
ToxicWazte said:
So in other words, they have no excuse for raping us with SMS costs. No fees to charge each other for terminating an SMS, like with voice calls, and the costs are miniscule. Yet the average price is still around 75c per SMS!! :eek: :sick: :sick: :sick:

Is this not collusion!?!?
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+1 For 160KB worth of info.
 
HTF can you charge interconnect charges on SMS's????? The amount of data required is negligable...

Anyway, we should be looking at allowing sms over GPRS. This is already possible with most handsets and is practiced in one or two South American countries. It would be great to pay for sms data rather than fixed rates.
 
robgun said:
HTF can you charge interconnect charges on SMS's????? The amount of data required is negligable...

Anyway, we should be looking at allowing sms over GPRS. This is already possible with most handsets and is practiced in one or two South American countries. It would be great to pay for sms data rather than fixed rates.
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Its called MXiT!!!!
 
ToxicWazte said:
So in other words, they have no excuse for raping us with SMS costs. No fees to charge each other for terminating an SMS, like with voice calls, and the costs are miniscule. Yet the average price is still around 75c per SMS!! :eek: :sick: :sick: :sick:

Is this not collusion!?!?
Click to expand...

I have always believed the SMS charges to be a ripoff. For this reason I very seldom send and SMS from my handset and rather only reply from my workstation with the free SMS service offered by VC.
 
ToxicWazte said:
So in other words, they have no excuse for raping us with SMS costs. No fees to charge each other for terminating an SMS, like with voice calls, and the costs are miniscule. Yet the average price is still around 75c per SMS!! :eek: :sick: :sick: :sick:

Is this not collusion!?!?
Click to expand...

Where do you get the 75c/text from? Surely you can buy packages through banks and other places for way, way less than that? Through FNB it's about 30 to 40 cents an text. :confused:

Edit: from 50 cents a text down to 22.5 cents a text
 
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Lowering SMS prices could have unintended consequences

Lowering the price of SMS might have some unintended consequences. While the cost is a problem when you are sending messages, it is a benefit when others are messaging you. Quite frankly, I would like to limit messages to my phone to those that think twice before sending, and pay a premium to do so. Skype is free, and even though I have added only 15 contacts, the communications overload from these 15 resulted in me switching it off 99.9% of the time. With mobile phones the whole world can potentially contact you, and if you make it cheap enough, they will!

In South Africa, there is zero interconnect on SMS between local operators. The networks only allow home routing of application to person traffic. In a sense they have agreed not to compete when it comes to application to person traffic.

Not having interconnect charges between international networks can result in many problems such as spam, scams and spoofing. Following the message trial becomes much more difficult if it originated in a foreign country. In 2003, the UK saw a significant drop in sms spam after the introduction of local and international interconnect charges on SMS. At the same time South Africans saw a marked increase in SMS costs to the UK.
 
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