(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

"Signal uses your phone's data connection so you can avoid SMS and MMS fees."

In what fucking *universe* is mobile data cheaper than SMS?

I am aware of four basic categories of mobile-phone plan: "SMS is expensive; mobile data is even more expensive", "the marginal SMS is free; mobile data is moderately expensive", "the marginal SMS and the marginal megabyte are both free, but the *base* monthly price is incredibly high", and the Chatr $35/month plan (which is still a lot compared to the ~$12/month† of a basic Public Mobile plan).

Look, I'm all in favour of encryption, but encouraging people to treat SMS and data-based texting as interchangeable and to default to using data sounds frankly *dangerous*. I have had a vision of the future in which I join Signal, and it's me desperately trying to get it through people's heads under which circumstances they need to use insecure mode when contacting me, *failing* to get it through their heads, and missing time-sensitive messages because people tried to send them to me over a nonexistent Internet connection.

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†depending on how many discounts you qualify for; maximum cost is $15

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(edit: part 2)

Comments

[yvannairie]

*puts hand up* I pay per call and per SMS and I have unlimited data (speedcapped at 10MB but honestly it goes up to 5GB on the reg b/c it bounces me from network to network so the data cap is more of a suggestion). My base bill is 12€ + whatever I spend on text messages and phone calls.

For context, the next cheapest option that has unlimited calls and texting and unlimited 10MB data would be ~25€ and I have no reason to switch b/c my bill doesn't go over 20€ basically ever unless something has gone horribly wrong and I spend all day on the phone trying to fix it.

Speedcapped internet is the norm in many places, which... IDK if that's a good thing, but considering how much of Signal's userbase is in SEA countries, that's probably the markets they looked at when deciding on what kind of infrastructure to use.

[brin_bellway]

Oh wow, so that universe *does* exist, and honestly it sounds pretty sweet. Like, I'm not gonna move to Finland just for that, but twelve euros a month for unlimited (and presumably fully bootstrappable *without* regard to whether your interlocutor also has Internet†, give or take dropped calls because your connection was too slow to support live voice) data? Where do I sign?!

Last I checked there is exactly one speedcapped plan in Canada (the Chatr $35/month plan I mentioned in the OP; you can also pay more than $35 in exchange for more data before the speed throttling kicks in). I knew it was the norm in the US, but I think Americans still have essentially the same four-category system I described above, just with a lot more plans in category #4.

(I do not currently have *any* phone plan, but after I graduate I'm planning to get the $12†† Public Mobile plan, which is unlimited SMS + unlimited incoming calls + 100 minutes of outgoing calls + 250 MB of data. (After 250 MB they cut you off unless you've pre-paid for additional data (indefinite rollover, lasts until used) at $15/GB. This is a big improvement: it used to be $30/GB. They also now fairly routinely give away a free GB of indefinite-rollover data once or twice a year if you pay enough attention to their news page to know when there are promo codes to claim.))

I tend to be of the opinion that unlimited-but-slow data plans are good (relative to limited-but-fast) and we should have more of them. The only thing that really concerns me is that people might get complacent if they have Internet access at all times, necessity being the mother of invention and all that, but that's pretty much never been a good enough reason to not do something before. And honestly it seems like a lot of Canadians have managed to get complacent about reliable Internet *despite* a lack of unlimited mobile options, so it probably isn't even helping build character very much.

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†that one I use is maybe not suitable for Europe, but there's a bunch of similar ones out there and one of them probably fits better ↩

††about €8, give or take cost of living ↩

[wingedcatgirl]

That plan would be ideal for us. Why does the US not have plans of this nature?

[yvannairie]

Mmm to be fair, North America has absolute garbo mobile infrastructure overall, so it might be that... the companies literally can't afford uncapped internet for everyone, because their whole network would come down. Considering how often people are like "yeah, we couldn't reach anyone b/c all the lines were busy" basically never happens here, and in Finland we actually have nationally mandated network redundancy and internet is considered a utility like water or electricity.

But the likelier answer is just North American Gold Rush Capitalism, because IIRC, speedcapped internet is also the norm in pretty much every other continent. Once the infrastructure is built, it is more profitable to have as many people on it at cheap prices to keep the money for upkeep rolling in. It's the difference between making all of the money, right away, or making some money, a little bit at a time, growing slowly over time.

[thedarlingone]

"it might be that... the companies literally can't afford uncapped internet for everyone, because their whole network would come down."

Context: I take calls for one of the US's four large cellular providers, specifically the one whose biggest selling point is "We have coverage where nobody else does", so our userbase skews to people who either are willing to pay higher prices for the extra coverage or are too rural to get service through anyone else. So my perspective is pretty limited to "here's how this one US company does things", and I have pretty much no knowledge of how other countries handle cellular. With all that said -- I'm not sure I'm exactly following what y'all are meaning by "uncapped" data, but this comment made me think of a conversation I occasionally have with customers, so I thought I'd toss it in.

More context: we offer an assortment of what are officially called "share plans" and what I usually call "data-capped plans" in conversation, where the customer pays for a set X number of gigabytes per month (plus unlimited talk and text), to be shared between all the cellular devices on the same bill, and if they use more than that, they are charged $15 per gigabyte of overage, unless they have opted into the setting where they are throttled after the X gigabytes instead. (The opt-in nature of the throttling has definitely got an element of "let's get more money out of this", but given how... common it is for my customers to be Very Alarmed when any throttling does occur, I also think "okay let's not throttle this subset of people unless they know it's going to happen" was probably a smart call.)

We also offer an assortment of what are officially called "unlimited" plans, where you can opt for a choice between "throttling whenever the cell tower has more than a threshold amount of traffic" or "throttling only after X gigabytes, and then only when the cell tower has more than the threshold amount of traffic". We *used*, and this is where your comment reminded me of things, years ago we *used* to offer a completely different structure of data plans, where each cellular line had its own allotted amount of data, and if you were willing to pay for "unlimited", it was true high-speed never-throttled unlimited data that would always have first priority to the cell tower. (A very, very, very few of our customers still have this plan. When a call comes through where I have to change something like the number of texts or voice minutes, which were *not* unlimited on this plan, I always feel like I'm juggling glass figurines, because it's so old I've never actually been trained on it but it's obviously imperative that I don't accidentally lose that plan for the customer.)

Anyways. So now we get to this conversation I occasionally have with customers, which is what I thought of when I read your comment. The customer asks something like "but why do you call it unlimited if it's not unlimited", which is fair but obviously I don't admit that because customer service. XP So what I say is usually, "It's unlimited insofar as you never pay an overage cost. We used to offer true high-speed forever unlimited internet, but there were a few people who were using so much that nobody else could get through. The story goes, and I don't know how true this is, but the story goes that there was a guy in New York who was running a sports bar off some of our mobile hotspot boxes, so we had to do *something*. So we put in place this system we have now, where you have unlimited, but if you've used more than ~50GB in a month, you can get put in kind of this 'slow lane' to the cell tower where if there's a bunch of other traffic on the network you may experience a slowdown." (Another quirk of my customer service terminology is that I never admit in that specific term that we're throttling you. For some reason that term really puts people's backs up.)

Anyway, that was rambly, but that's where my brain went, is this maybe-apocryphal story of the time part of a USian cellular network did fall over due to somebody using fully uncapped data too extensively.

[brin_bellway]

What are you talking about? The United States has *tons* of speedcapped plans! A couple years ago I did some research for [a then-homeless American friend who was reliant on mobile data as their primary Internet connection] and determined the three best companies for their needs were Simple Mobile, Twigby, and TextNow, but there are others and the optimal answers may have changed since then.

(I just looked at them again and Twigby's plans start at $20, which translates to about €16, *and* it comes with unlimited talk and text! They'll try to sell you on their flex plans where you stay on fast data and at the end of the month they charge you for whichever quantity tier you ended up using that month, but you can just say no and they'll leave you on the lowest price tier and give you free slow data instead.)

The United States has *lovely* data availability. No, the thing that's *actually* bullshit about your mobile-phone system is the rampant use of carrier locks. (Canada outlawed carrier-locking several years ago.)

[thedarlingone]

My context here is US-only, because I work for Large Telecom Provider so I'm extremely familiar with how this specific company does things but have very little familiarity with how cellular anything works outside the States. But the first place my brain went is the call I had around Christmas where I discovered (after a great deal of troubleshooting and research) that the kiddie/eldercare smartwatch we sell, whose main advertising point is "give your child/elderly relative talk-and-text functionality with only the 10 people you choose, also includes location tracking", is not actually SMS capable. All the advertising and troubleshooting material refers to "text messaging" rather than SMS, but nobody (including me) notices that that's a distinction until it turns out that the watch can't actually send or receive SMS, only direct messages through the parental/caretaker's watch-controller app.

(I wound up writing quite an... expressive email to be forwarded to corporate, embodying the customer complaint that you ought to *say* if your kiddie smartwatch can only text through an app, because then "let the kid text with Grandma through their safety smartwatch" turns into "oh god we have to teach Grandma a whole new app?" and nobody wants that. There was a bit of capslock. Polite and professional capslock, but still. Literally, this had never been mentioned or even hinted at in any of the support verbage around this gadget, and this is *me* saying that, with the near-photographic memory for odd bits of wording.)

So, um, anyway. This is a US-only widget, in fact a company-exclusive widget, and none of our plans that you can get anymore have per-text charges, so I am really fucking curious why that is a design decision that would be made. I have absolutely no knowledge of how SMS works on the technical level, so part of me wonders if it's harder to... secure in a particular way, or code for limited participants, or something? But I don't really know.

(I do know that iMessage also uses data instead of SMS, although there's a little switch in settings where you can make it default to SMS for troubleshooting purposes. This occasionally causes trouble when customers assume iMessage is the same as SMS in some particular way and that therefore I am the right person to call for help with it. Waiting on hold for an hour to find out you should have called Apple instead is never fun. I wonder if Apple does that to be more compatible with the plans described above where texts are charged but data is not, though, since they *are* a worldwide company. I always assumed they were just being proprietary for the fun of it, as is their wont.)

Anyway, this was rambly, but that was the thought I had.

[brin_bellway]

At least Signal has nice security features going for it, and the ability to fall back to SMS with people who don't use Signal or--if you can think to do it--with people who don't have Internet right now. But if Large Telecom Company admits that its smartwatch's talk-and-text is just Weird Proprietary Email and Weird Differently-Proprietary Skype, customers might start to wonder if maybe they should just use *regular* email and *regular* Skype (or Zoom or whatever).

[thedarlingone]

That's the odd thing, is that the voice calls are functional in the normal way. I don't know if that has anything to do with the fact that we're pretty much fully VOIP as our normal course of business these days -- all our phones are shipped with VOIP defaulted to on (it's got some weird branded name in the settings but it is VOIP), and we've been aggressively phasing out non-VOIP-capable older phones over the past two years I've been here. Now that I think of it, that might be relevant.

Edit: Also, I mean, the proprietary smartwatch is very much targeted only at "your kid is too young for a real phone yet and also might get kidnapped" and "your elderly relative would get scammed if they could get calls or texts from strangers, also if they have Alzheimer's you can find them when they wander off". For customers who are... responsible enough to have fully-functional smartwatches, we just sell the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch models.

Edit edit: For a while there, the fully-functional smartwatches were available only as add-ons to a phone line, they couldn't take calls on their own cellular number and be your only "phone". Apple Watch has recently rolled out the ability to be standalone again, which makes it a competitor to the proprietary smartwatch. We only just launched the non-kiddie-branded eldercare smartwatch around the same time, so I suspect we were trying to fill a niche with that which no longer needs filled, although granted the proprietary watch is a fuckton cheaper than an Apple Watch.

[brin_bellway]

Right, I *had* heard rumbles in the alternative-phone-operating-systems sphere about this "voice over LTE" thing and how it's soon going to be hard to make alternative-OS phones actually work as phones because they have a hard time getting access to the [drivers or somesuch] they need to become VoLTE-capable. (that *might* have just been for older hardware, but like, a four-year-old flagship makes a very serviceable budget phone, and a lot of alternative-OS makers pride themselves on helping to keep old tech in use and out of the e-waste bins)

(My response was to google whether Public Mobile is going VoLTE-only anytime soon, and the answer "not only are they not going VoLTE-*only*, they don't have *any* VoLTE". Canada being behind the times isn't *all* bad, I guess.)

I'm so accustomed to "VoIP" meaning "the thing you make do with when you don't have a proper mobile phone, with a SIM card and everything". It's weird to hear about major American carriers apparently just abandoning everything that makes their communication method desirable *except* mobile data. I guess it might be like the thing where all forms of machine converge on simply being computers in differently-shaped vessels: perhaps all forms of communication become Internet in the end.

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I had my first email account when I was six, back when the TV had a channel lock on it so I couldn't watch cartoons without permission. I don't *think* my parents did an email whitelist where anything that wasn't sent from a permitted address got immediately deleted (I'm not sure, it's been a while), but I think that *is* a thing.