I don't like getting nickel-and-dimed by any business out there, including my own employer, who shall remain nameless. I get really annoyed, however, by the whining in the media about wireless operators charging for SMS traffic "data transfers that are virtually free to run". OK, the data transfer part may indeed be negligible, but there is a system with geographically distributed nodes (ka-ching!), each node built for high availability (ka-ching!), had to be purchased from the vendor (ka-ching!), with a support contract (ka-ching!), and people within the company maintaining the system. So, while utilizing the paging channel for SMS delivery is indeed gravy, handling SMS within the network required a multi-million dollar investment by the carriers, spent with the specific goal in mind: enabling my teenage kids to ping-pong all day long messages like "sup?", "i'm bord" "u suk", "ha, tag!", etc.

Please, if slashot is indeed a place for majority technical crowd, let's not proliferate the myth of "SMS is free for the carrier" around here, but leave it to the ignorant media instead.

Disclosure: I work for one of the major wireless carriers in the US in technical capacity (not marketing, PR, finance, or alike). I do not support the messaging platform, although I know people who do. No, I will not fix your cellphone :)

I am actually involved in telco business, although not with the SMS technology. TFA completely omits the SMSC in the infrastructure. From TFA: "A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset." Wonderful, right? Just throw it into the "pipes" and it will magically arrive at the destination. If we used the article's logic, we could argue that ground shipping is a rip-off by the FedEx/UPS/DHL/USPS since most roads in the US are toll-free, thus it shouldn't cost hardly anything to deliver a package from point A to point B. Oh, well, another example of, ahem, "journalistic excellence" from NYT.

Well, the "5, Insightful" raises the bar quite high, but I'll attempt to challenge the insightfullness :)

One should look beyond 3G and consider if Ericsson might have some vested interest in 4G technology, e.g. Wi-Max. Perhaps 3G is a weak competitor to Wi-Fi, but Wi-Max, once the kinks get worked out will pose a serious challenge. I really don't think I am alone in not liking to mess with the different SSID/WEP/WPA/WPA2 configurations every time I want to get online in a new place. I like the convenience of my EVDO connectivity that works wherever my wireless provider has coverage (Please, don't start bitching about coverage, even the worst wireless carriers have considerably wider footprint than the dinky Wi-Fi) . Based on the "Posted from a wifi hotspot" comment, it may be fair to deduce that the poster has not experienced the consistent convenience of EVDO. Yes, admittedly EVDO is slower than a G-Wi-Fi with a good broadband behind it, but that is why I hope the Wi-Max will marry the convenience of EVDO with performance of Wi-Fi.

I cannot disagree that quite often wireless carriers have pricing structures that feel like medieval torture chambers. That is an unfortunate trend in billing practices in today's world in general. The book "Gotcha Capitalism" (Amazon.com: http://tinyurl.com/38353y) discusses quite a few examples of despicable practices by many businesses. That is the dark side of capitalism today, but let's not forget that at some point even inside the most evil carrier, there are technically minded people who truly believe in the technology they provide to the customers, and people who believe that customers will buy the services because of their beneficial qualities, not because they got bamboozled by the marketing department.