Forgot your password?

typodupeerror
Facebook

Facebook may bust up the SMS profit cartel-> 3

Submitted by
AndyAndyAndyAndy
AndyAndyAndyAndy writes " Fortune has a very interesting article today about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans.

'Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.'

A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company yesterday.

The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps.

The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans."

Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Right on! (Score 2) 364

by psyque (#35090722) Attached to: Usage Based Billing In Canada To Be Rescinded
So what your suggesting is that the government comes in and stomps all the companies that provide internet to Canadians into the ground? For companies like Shaw, sure why not, but what about all the responsible ISPs? What your talking about is privatizing the internet. That scares me because then you only have the government controlling the price and they will have no competition. "Tax the Internet!"

Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.

Working...