AT&T Boosting Pay-Per-Use Messaging Rates Again
You read correctly, AT&T, the biggest GSM carrier in the United States, will be once again raising the cost to send or receive a message. Text message rates will go up $0.05 to $0.20 per message, while MMS rates will also increase by a nickel, up to $0.30. Note that these changes only affect subscribers who are not currently on a monthly messaging plan, and will not increase the overage rates for those already on a plan.
Note also that the big carriers are so desperate to convince customers to use messaging on their handsets that they have resorted to bullying them into signing up for a monthly package. For instance, AT&T currently offers the Messaging Starter package, which includes 200 messages for $5 per month. At these new rates, 200 text messages would cost $40!
Surely there is a better way to convince people to sign up for a package than by bullying them into it, specially since it costs AT&T less than a penny to deliver these messages?
These new rates are set to go into effect on March 30, 2008.
This is RIDICULOUS. I can’t believe people including the mainstream news agencies have not covered this and made a big to do.
Posted by Jeb on January 29th, 2008 at 1:13 am.Sprint was first to up their rates from 10 cents to 15 cents back in 2006. ATT quickly followed this rate hike in 2007.
As you will recall, Sprint then raised their rates from 15 cents to 20 cents in November of 2007. We should have only guessed that ATT would follow with this rate hike.
It can only be assumed that they are trying to recover costs from their 3g build out by raising the rates for the one easy target, SMS. The one problem we see here is Americans are just now starting to understand the power of SMS. However, if you make it too expensive in the beginning, then uptake will not be as fast then if you kept rates low to get people in, then show them a rate package.
Posted by Giff Gfroerer on January 29th, 2008 at 3:15 pm.