(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.

[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.