With peering to ISPs it isn't about equal traffic in both directions, that is more when Tier 1 companies peer.

Actually... "traffic ratios" are more about what large ISPs use as a tool to prevent smaller ISPs from peering with them settlement-free, as a substitute from purchasing transit.

Other than traffic ratios are an illustrative tool, that beancounters can understand. They kind of fall apart in a sense, when there are "one of a kind" destinations that aren't on your network -- that your own subscribers demand access to. Whatever ISPs have the best connectivity to Netflix, Google, and the top CDNs, have a sizable advantage, in terms of their end users' perception of performance.

Verizon (Formerly UUnet) is Tier1. Cogent is a "wannabe" Tier1; that likes to get into 'peering disputes' with other providers, as a way of strong-arming in attempt to claw its way from transit-free to Tier1 status.

So "Verizon vs Cogent" is a Tier1 matter.

Cogent's transit-free status, does prevent them from paying, by the way.

Verizon already got paid, by their customers, the ones who are requesting to stream from Netflix.

Not only that... if you are ISP, and you have enough traffic to Netflix; Netflix will provide a 'local cache box' to install on your network. OpenConnect hardware appliance.

Netflix pays for the hardware and such.

Large ISPs such as Verizon, can potentially put multiple boxes on their network, so they save cost and do not transport large amounts of Netflix traffic long distances.

Verizon chooses not too. Obviously, they cannot think their customers do not value Netflix. Clearly, they don't care much about their customers -- or there's an alterior motive; or just plain ignorance, blindness, and stupidity.

Nothing prevents Cogent from purchasing access to Verizon network.

Verizon is a Tier1. Tier 1 providers do not buy transit, period.

"Peering" is usually mutally beneficial, meaning traffic ingress and egress is balanced. I

No: settlement-free peering is usually mutually beneficial, meaning the benefit to both parties of the relationship is larger than the cost.

Traffic ratios are almost irrelevent. Although, they are commonly used for negotiation purposes.

Pushing more traffic into Verizon's network than you pull, means that Verizon's users are requesting data from you.

If Verizon were not a monopoly; there is no question that this would be mutually beneficial --- if there is poor connectivity to Netflix, or greater latency / worse performance, then competing providers would be favorable for subscribers.

Better connectivity to Netflix is beneficial for an ISP; moreso, than the cost of some extra ports.

Would you bitch if you ignored/missed such a warning only to have a tree land on your car as you drove to the store? Or perhaps if you had your skull busted in by a tennis-ball sized hailstone?

Severe thunderstorms come with a built-in warning message, thunder.

No.. And those things are always risks, not significantly more likely to occur during a thunderstorm recognized as severe.

There tend to be thunderstorms 2 to 3 days a week, most of them are "severe".

Although there are never/hardly any trees falling or large hail.

Whether in a severe thunderstorm, or not, being hit with such a thing would be a freak accident.

And the network already exists because it causes profit with other uses. Adding SMSes does not increase the cost of maintenance.

What causes you to arbitrarily state that causes profit with other uses?

Perhaps it's those other uses that are free, and SMS that is not.

No. Your notion that no cost should be attributed to SMS is just bs. When you have a capital asset that is used in multiple businesses, then it has costs are attributable to all the businesses, because all the businesses involved consume or require the presence of an incremental portion of resources.

Furthermore, you glazed over the support costs for SMS which are recurring, likely much larger than the equipment costs, and would not occur if SMS service was not being offered.

I disagree. For strictly medical purposes, if they wanted to be this creepy, there would never be the need for the last two

The distinctions should exist. Obviously, not all medical professionals, such as the dentist, would need the information, and if they don't need it and the information cannot be relevant: they should not ask for it.

On the other hand; the kind of sexual relations a person is having, can affect the disease diagnosis, as it may have a statistical bearing on certain medical problems..

The "Identification" gender is certainly important, as it should be used to provide the customer the proper service, for example: using the proper pronouns to address the person, and verification that their record matches the state ID's version of gender.

They aren't building a system to do this- the system already exists. So those fixed costs are already paid for,

No... they have to keep paying to maintain 'the system'... which includes repairs, and maintenance: hardware also has a finite lifetime.

For example, a typical storage system has an annual maintenance of ~10% per component. After 5 years, the annual maintenance price tends to go up precipitously, so in general, the systems will be refitted not too infrequently.

The reality is that fixed costs are not one-time costs, and they matter. The marginal costs are very small, but not zero, and they matter as well.

Any business has to profit to stay in business, and has to have a return commensurate with the risks involved in their spending the capital, for investors to allocate capital to the business in the first place ----- and the purchase of very large expensive infrastructure equipment (for which there are not subscribers yet) is quite high on the risk scale.

Morover, a percentage of the cellular infrastructure itself is directly attributable to SMS traffic. It is not valid to say all these expensive components were just purchased for voice and data, and that SMS is free

If cell phones just needed voice communications, the implementation would likely be more efficient, and not need as-frequent control traffic.

Therefore, SMS messages as a product create a requirement that dictates a certain network design that would be less-efficient, than if SMS communications could be eschewed.

"Kept on the display" would be a problem. The message has to be dismissable.

I've got emergency flash flood, tornado watch, and severe thunderstorm warning alerts on my iPhone.

The alerts are non-dismissable. They appear on the lock screen; they cannot be dismissed like other notifications. Every time you go to the notification center, the alert will be there.

The last time I received a tornado warning, that message stayed in my notification center for DAYS.

The alarm that is emitted when the message first received is very loud (much louder than the standard SMS message warning), annoying, and is emitted, even when the volume control on the phone's ringer/alert tones are at zero (In other words: the alert tone is annoying, and you have to wait a few seconds for it to stop, or completely turn off the phone's power to prevent it from occuring): you cannot make your phone be silent as easily with these warnings as with other alert tones.

I missed the part where the delete button was disabled, and there was a quiz to determine that you had in fact read the text message prior to deletion. :-)

Excellent reply to anyone complaining about spam in general. Viagra ads can be perfectly justified, because there's still a delete button :)

In a large scale disaster (hurricane, earthquake, etc) you would be irritated by getting a free text telling you where emergency relief (shelter, blankets, food, water) may be found?

They generally don't tell you that. You have to watch the news and listen to other radio programming to find where the shelters are.

By the way... they interrupt the news and other programming with the EAS alerts.

Even the really shitty EAS alerts like "severe thunderstorm warning", or "flood warning" (pertaining mostly to some county 20 miles away that has some really low-lying areas), that are about non-threatening conditions, or conditions known 24 hours in advance.

It's always a non-costodial parent, not some random kindnapping. It scared the hell out of me when my phone started vibrating and yelling just because another kid went missing.

See... the AMBER alert laws, need to be changed, so an alert only goes out if the person reporting them missing swears that the kidnapper was unknown or "all custodial parents signed off on the report", or there was evidence (besides the kidnapping), that the child is in danger.

This type alert should be reserved for "in progress" emergencies. What would be annoying is to get these alerts for days before (only to then possibly have it miss).

This type of alert should be restricted to unanticipated events that occured without notice, or clarity on when they would be occuring.

In other words: if the event was warned about within 24 hours. There should be no abuse of alerting systems to warn about what was already announced.

You're an idiot if you're complaining about this. The EAS (and its predecessor, the EBS) has been around for almost 50 years and is a necessary, though at times potentially ineffective, capability to have. From the mid-90s into the late 2000's there was concern that the "traditional" methods of activation would be come less and less effective.

My biggest problem with the EAS is I think it's abused. I frequently have cable broadcasts interrupted in the middle of a program for "tests", or for "a severe thunderstorm warning" somewhere.

The fact of the matter, is it is an abusive intrusion that I should have a right to escape.

And now you also know that any carrier charging you more than $0 for SMS is full of shit (it doesn't cost then anything)

Yes it does cost them.

You are perpetuating a fallacy, that fixed costs don't matter, only marginal ones per transaction; this is the same sort of flawwed argument some people use to rationalize music or software piracy to themselves. The reality is that in business, all costs matter, and products in the marketplace get priced based on both fixed and marginal cost.

The marginal cost to the carrier per SMS message are very low or close to $0. There is no additional cell network capacity used.

On the other hand... what is consumed, is capacity of systems involved in storing and forwarding the SMS content. That is to say, when you send someone a text message, there is an entry in a database created somewhere -- that record needs to get from your tower to the recipient's handset; there will be some cost in terms of magnetic storage.

If they are purchasing enterprise class storage arrays for branch locations where they route these messages, the average cost is about $25 per gigabyte. at an average length of 80 characters per text message, and each message passing through each system, each text message costs about $0.000004, in storage that will be temporarily tied up; now, each processor node that receives and forwards these text messages, also has a CPU capacity, and each text message has a fraction of CPU and RAM that will be temporarily tied up as well.

When all is said and done, you can make the argument that a SMS usage, probably takes up $0.0001 in marginal cost.

Furthermore, there is some equipment the carrier has to purchase and continuously maintain for SMS functionality to continue to work. They also have to provide support for their customers, so there is an average operational cost text per message per month (in support terms) for providing a SMS service.

The average fixed cost portion, eventually decreases with sufficient number of text messages -- at least until equipment capacity is reached, and better storage, forwarding, and accounting systems are needed to provide more capacity -- stair step pattern, if you need to buy a $500,000 storage array, the cost per text message ever sent will initially will be very high, and gradually average down over time.

They charge users of the service more than what it costs them, per message

That's called margin, and is a fundamental requirement for a service to be worth providing -- if there's no profit in it, then the carrier should not provide the service. And you could make the argument that they are taking advantages due to the lack of competition in the current market place, resulting from monopolistic practices, and the government's anti-consumer practice of auctioning "exclusive spectrum rights", to supplement the treasury's tax revenues.

However The cost per SMS message is not $0. The marginal portion is zero. The fixed portion is not.