T-Mobile rumoured to have increased UK interworking SMS charges to 4p
I had this anonymous tip / rumour sent in last night:
T-Mobile UK have just increased their interworking charges (the rate other networks pay them for terminating SMS) from 3p to 4p. All the other UK networks are 3p. Expect SMS aggregators all over the land to start putting their prices up across the board, as most of them can’t distinguish traffic between one network and another so will have to do the whole lot rather than risk losing money. Might even see the cross-network rates rise on other networks mobile price plans, who knows..
I haven’t had the opportunity to verify this. I phoned T-Mobile’s UK press office to confrm this, but, alas, got voicemail a few times.
Can anyone confirm this?
Update @3pm: A few people in the know reckon that T-Mobile would need their heads looked at if they did this. However no confirmation as yet so treat with a big pinch of salt.
Maybe its time people in your part of the world also started sending SMS/TEXT messages from their PC. Overseas SMS/TEXT charges are unreasonably expensive in this part of the world, so some of us here resort to a local company, http://www.smszilla.com
Posted by nirmalya on October 30th, 2006 at 12:44 am.Er ok. If whoever provides SMS connectivity to smszilla has a proper agreement to terminate messages with T-Mobile, they’ll be affected by any price rise. If not, you’ll find it’s likely T-Mobile will block the messages - if not now it won’t take long for them to find out.
There’s no ‘proper’ way to get around this. Yes you could use el cheapo backdoor routes via Russia, Middle East, China, etc - but as most of these are just dumping SMS traffic on the SS7 network and hoping it’ll get delivered, chances are that it’ll be really unreliable.
Just have to sit back and wait til Ofcom do their review into wholesale SMS termination next year, and when given the chance make your views known!
Posted by Alex on October 31st, 2006 at 12:06 am.