Text messaging
Posted: Fri 24 February, 2006 Filed under: Thoughts 6 Comments »I noticed a story today about “Texter’s Thumb” becoming a potential health issue, and one of the statistics in it (from a survey by Virgin Mobile) said that on average 93 million text messages are sent in the UK every day. That’s a remarkable figure.
But then the old questioning brain kicks in, and I wonder if they meant “entire messages”, regardless of message length, or whether it’s each bundle of up-to-and-including 160 characters? For example, it’s quite normal for me to send a message to Herself (and many others) that consists of two, if not three, blocks of 160 characters. The phone automatically splits it up and sends it properly. To me that’s one message, but to the network it’s two (or three) – but does it count as three, or as one?
If your network sends three messages, you pay for three messages.
Indeed. Or I would if I didn’t have 750 free messages per month, which I never use up…
I don’t understand that report. 93 million a day in the UK but only 700 million a year in the US, without any hint as to the point of the comparison. Do we in th UK, send that many more messages per head than the 5-times more populous Americans, or is it a typo?
I have the distinct feeling that I’m missing the point.
Text messaging is still (to my understanding) more of a “new” technology in the US – the GSM standard didn’t get used over there til fairly recently, and I don’t *think* that the CDMA standard the US uses supported text-messaging per se.
So yes, the UK (and other European countries) are well ahead of the US in text-message use/sending.
That’s not a text – that’s an essay!
Does she receive it as one or three messages? I think I sent one today which went over 160, so I concluded that the phone intelligently broke it down without me knowing. but she hasn’t responded yet, so I don’t know if made any sense to her…!