Samar Srivastava gives his take on why text messaging didn’t take off in USA
For a long time, mobile companies in America have made handsets cheaper by forcing users to take a one or two year contract. This includes a minimum number of minutes every month, and for messaging consumers pay extra. In the end consumers are left with little incentive to send messages when their calls are essentially free. In most other countries subscribers are on pay as you go plans. In this case, messaging is a lot cheaper than calling and so users have taken to texting in far larger numbers.
True. If I have to pay 10 cents for each text message, I would rather use my free minutes to call or use a cheap 2 cent calling card from a public phone. I really couldn’t understand why carriers are hesitant to make text messaging affordable.
