(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.

---

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

---

(edit: part 2)

Comments

[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.

---

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.