There was a time when SMS was free

About 10 years ago, SMS (short message service or more commonly called texting) was practically free. Everyone can send as many text messages as they want all day, every day and it won’t cost them an extra cent. Of course, there were only a few people who had cell phones then and mostly the big old one-liner soapbar-type ones. Back then, owning a mobile phone was a luxury (not much of a necessity yet) and a single SIM card would cost you just under Php1,000. Today, a SIM card can be bought for as low as Php50 while others are practically given away. Phone owners have also grown to as much as 45 Million – almost half the total population on the Philippines. Mobile phones abound at cheap prices and making phone calls are also cheaper. Despite the trend, only one telco service has defied the affordability scale – and that’s the SMS. From free unlimited text, telcos started charging per message sent. As a bonus, a airtime credit reloads are given free bulk SMS quotas. Then, they reduced the free credits until there was none. Text messaging grew exponentially. The Philippines was tagged the SMS Capital of the World with over 1 Billion text messages sent every day across all networks. Text messaging has become the golden money machine. Telcos are earning more than fifty percent (50%) of their wireless services revenues from SMS. Now that the telcos are making bucket-loads of money, some sector and the government are pressuring the cellphone companies to make SMS free again. It’s a debatable issue actually. Is it still possible for telcos to offer SMS for free? I guess so, yes. But that’s without unwanted consequences. A loss in revenue from SMS will make it harder for them to upgrade their network when it is needed. Likewise, offering unlimited free text messaging will undoubtedly overload the capacity of the network. Too much usage, limited network -- we all know how it looks like – totally unreliable service. That’s not a nice scenario either. What I think would be a fair demand is to ask the telcos for accountability and transparency – (1) remove the 60 day expiration on load credits, (2) provide online on-demand usage logs of all voice and data usage, (3) and remove/reduce inter-connection charges between networks. I think we deserve proper customer service for what we all pay for. Service providers can start by taking accountability and being transparent to its customers. - Abe Olandres / YugaTech