Isn't it ridiculous how much can it cost to send an SMS over a cellular network? I would understand if they were sending a video message from Mars but it's a really small ASCII text message sent to a neighbor country in the 21-st century. The whole global telephone system needs to be re-designed.
It's not just that — SMS actually get delivered as part of the unused signalling capacity as far as the airwaves are concerned, hence the 160 7bit limitation, to fit into the existing protocols.
E.g., as far as the the costs go, I'd argue that airwaves would be most expensive in something like SMS, as it's a limited and finite resource that has to be shared by everyone within a given geographic area, yet they're basically used for free here due to the signalling already being mandatory even without SMS, so, any charge for SMS is basically pure profit by selling a resource that has to exists just for the signalling alone.
If someone knows more about how is managed between ME and the tower, please correct me if I'm wrong. There's also the cost to run SMSC (Short Message service center), but that part would be done in the cloud, and cloud is a pretty commodity resource nowadays, where these sorts of costs per message can hardly be justified, so, basically, it'll probably be the billing itself that contributes most of the cost to the cost of SMS.
P.S. Fun fact: I took a course at UWaterloo (in Canada) about the maths behind the computer networks, and during the time of the course, my professor has testified as a witness for US Government about the rising costs of SMS — https://www.c-span.org/person/?srinivasankeshav.
Why should the company sell SMS in relation to its cost? The seat selection on a plane costs literally zero for the company but people pay like 50 USD to seat at the front.
A phone company just needs to find creative ways to earn profit. Why is it evil?
It is evil when it's unreasonably expensive. The fact just a small number of people would use it in their sane mind even though there is capacity to serve much more people at no additional expense for the provider (nor for the environment) suggests there is no reason to keep prices this high.
It shouldn't cost anything at all. SMS piggybacks onto the signalling paths of GSM, which had 128 bytes unused, that can fit 160 characters. Your phone is sending & receiving those signals anyway, regardless of if you are sending an SMS message.
Roaming prices are the equivalent of scamming tourists, I don’t think there’s any body that can prevent it internally unfortunately, it’s just somehow acceptable for companies to shake down travelers for stupid amounts of money.
And sadly it was phone companies pretending it was their benevolence, saying "Now on our network you can roam in the EU with the same tariff as back home!".
I've read a new clause in an ad that lists the UK as one of these countries, with an asterisk that said only until the date of Brexit (obviously..).
I wonder how much of this was due to ministers being annoyed at having to change SIM cards whenever they landed in Brussels...
My operator made roaming outside the EU very expensive (EUR 35 for 1 week, with a limited amount of calls and messages, and 150 MB of data traffic, yes, megabytes). But being able to use phone normally anywhere in the EU, even if only with 3G, is great. Just have to remember to disable 4G.
I switched to a new plan after that rule came into effect and my new plan happens to be a lot worse outside the EU. I am not sure if this is a coincidence.
It would be interesting to see which countries voted for and against the ban. If Italy was against the ban for example, to stop ripping off travelers, that would be amusing. :)
This is where the ham radio APRS protocol would come in handy.
It was designed for position reporting. If course not everywhere would have an APRS receiver, but I'm sure the tracker could cache data until it finds a receiving station.
What are the power requirements for something like that? Since the stations are much less densely distributed than cell towers I'd expect you'd have to use a lot more energy transmitting if you'd hope to get any data. This needs to be light enough to attach to an eagle.
There are APRS transmitters built for balloons that are not much bigger than a matchbox. It's all line-of-sight at the VHF frequencies and you can get quite a good distance on a surprisingly low amount of power. 50 miles on 200mW what's is doable, longer range on less power is not uncommon if the conditionss are in your favour.
I wonder if a virtual country code could be made for scientific inquests like this which are immune from termination and transit fees in use cases like this. Would be good for science.
The BBC article (see dupe link below / https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50180781 ) says their provider agreed to "bail them out"... I think the easiest thing for the scientists would be/have been to talk to whoever is providing the infrastructure.
In South Africa the traffic lights had some cards in them at one point and the same things happened. Traffic lights smashed so the cards could be used.
Please do not take HN threads further into ideological flamewar or nationalistic flamewar or whatever this is. It's off topic, nasty, and evokes worse. We unbanned you because you'd stopped posting comments that break the site guidelines, which is great—could you please stick to them?
> Please do not take HN threads further into ideological flamewar or nationalistic flamewar or whatever this is.
I appreciate your patience, dang. I genuinely never intended for this to become flamebait. I have no idea why people are so nasty to eachother. I'm not promoting any form of "nationalism" here (especially not living in South Africa or having business there), I just meant to counter the idea that poverty deterministically makes people immoral, with a point that sometimes immorality will make your society poor. Whatever everyone else is talking about is their business, but I honestly don't see how I can participate at the same level of conversation as the parent comment, and not have some risk of people reading way more into it than is necessary. You say "it's nasty", but from my perspective, it's pretty nasty to say that all poor people will just steal your stuff and can't be helped; sounds like supremecism to me, even if it can come from a good place.
"The society has no standards" and "the state is organized around cultural jingoism" are inflammatory statements, not a thoughtful exploration of the root causes of poverty in South Africa. It's important, when talking about painful and divisive topics, not to sling cheap rhetoric like that.
If you're saying that your intention was to defend poor people, I believe you; but this is not the way to express it. You'd need to provide a much more patient explanation than that, and then go over it again to take out any provocations.
Very interesting comment, not because I agree with it, but I think it exposes a classic left vs right wing problem, and that the attitude is applied universally instead of selectively. IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group.
> IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group.
That's rather odd, because if anything I'd say the opposite is best - you can trust your ingroup to have similar values to you, and thus can afford to forgive them/be generous without being taken advantage of. On the other hand, outgroups WON'T share your values, and being more generous to them than to the ingroup is just self destructive.
And I would have thought both of those were common sense, too.
It's interesting, looking at chimps and bonobos it appears that both of those general strategies is employable, with bonobos being stranger friendly and chimps being stranger averse: https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/bonobos-meal-sharing/. Not exactly the same as what is being talked about here, but doesn't seem far off - note the mention even of bonobos preferentially sharing with strangers over friends and family.
Well, I think my optimum is just a hypothetical high-trust society in which everyone strives to be self-sufficient but gets supported in case of failure by others. Of course, this is not how the world works, which is more what you are describing. I don't think that is best though, from the perspective of humanity.
> high-trust society in which everyone strives to be self-sufficient but gets supported in case of failure by others.
But that IS how the world works! Or at least how parts of it have worked and still work. Puritan settlements in the Americas, Mormon communities today, arguably the Nordic countries, other closely knit peoples and communities throughout history... It's just that that comes from favoring the ingroup, not the outgroup.
I think when you remove ingroup and outgroup and just keep the argument for the attitude toward yourself/others it becomes more obvious what I mean. Otherwise it really depends on where you draw the boundary for the ingroup (e.g. your close family)/outgroup (e.g. your neighbors) which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
I guess my view is that it's easier (and has fewer negative side effects) to get people to care about others by expanding their ingroup than by making them care about their outgroup.
They did. It says so in the last paragraph of the article:
> Megafon's offer to bail out the team, reported by RIA Novosti news, means they can continue monitoring the eagles' routes, collecting vital data to help their survival.
It seems a prime advertising opportunity. Let the story get out and the crowd funding get underway. Then waive the charge or give a sum of money to the researchers.
A solution could be to design the system to make calls directly to a list of ornitologists or ornitologist societies in the other countries, that shouldn't be really complicated to arrange and then ask them to return the data by standard e-mail. Is a small world.
Or store the eagles travel data in a cloud, that feels also poetically appropriate for this case
I'm sure it's somewhat hard to change the system once deployed. They could just get a cheap global tariff -- but the eagles won't swap SIM cards themselves.
Or better yet an agreement with gsm operators were made ahead of the time so they did not charge the "eagle calls", and they were all made to a single cloud-or-whatever-distribution-center.
The problem here is data roaming charges. Those do not depend on the destination of the message. They are incurred when you send bytes to a cell tower operated by a carrier outside your plan.
As far as I know this kind of additional charge for dialing within the same country exists in some countries, but this should be not confused with "roaming charge" for intra-country roaming.
But if your SIM is away from the home network it is always roaming. The data will be sent back to the home country. So sending an SMS to a local number is like sending an SMS to a foreign number.
Yeah, except that somehow I found that it doesn't always work this way. I live in the UK, and when I call my mum in Poland using a British sim card, I have to pay extra for making a foreign call. But when she's over here, I can call her for free(using my domestic minutes allowance), even though I'm still dialing a +48 number, the telecom knows that the call is being routed internally and no extra charges are applied. Yes, I was surprised at that too.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/stork_mobile_theft/