Americans' cellphone texting costs

Both a US senator and a business professor writing about him in the New York Times found it a challenge recently to get to the bottom of cellphone texting's costs to customers vs. their costs to the cellphone carriers, given that the amount of texting Americans do has grown ten-fold in the past three years. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.), chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, was curious about why the cost of individual text messages (not unlimited plans) had doubled between 2005 and '08, and - when he asked the carriers - they spoke "at length about pricing plans without getting around to the costs of conveying text messages." Those costs did not go up anywhere near proportionately to the volume increase of text messages. The way the professor/commentator put it in the Times, "Customers with unlimited plans, like diners bringing a healthy appetite to an all-you-can-eat cafeteria, might think they’re getting the best out of the arrangement. But the carriers, unlike the cafeteria owners, can provide unlimited quantities of “food” at virtually no cost to themselves — so long as it is served in bite-sized portions [e.g., 160 characters per text]."

Mobile Web's rapid rise in developing world: Symbolic

All by itself China illustrates the potential of the mobile Web, The Economist points out. Seventy-three million people, or 29% of all Internet users in the country (the total number, which recently surpassed that of the US, is 250 million), use mobile phones to get online, and that number grew by 45% the first half of this year. Some 600 million people in China (about twice the US's total population) are mobile phone subscribers. But that's just China ("just"!). "Opera Software, a firm that makes Web-browser software for mobile phones, reports rapid growth in mobile-web browsing in developing countries," The Economist reports. "The number of web pages viewed in June by the 14m users of its software was over 3 billion, a 300% increase on a year earlier." Russia, Indonesia, India, and South Africa led that growth. The articles gives some examples of how very useful mobile-based transactions are in third-world countries.