Interestingly when roaming in Europe, T-mobile charge me 40p/SMS and 20p/MMS. It is actually cheaper* for me to write down what I want to say by hand, take a photo of it, and send that than it for me to tap out an SMS!
Why is this? Well it suggests to me that they want to encourage people off the old SMS infrastructure, possibly due to capacity or manageability issues, and shift them onto the much newer GPRS/3G/whatever network.
* Yes I know you can send text by MMS and I have an E71 so typing isn't a chore anyway.
No - they know most people are going to use SMS and want to gauge them for a s much money as possible.
The SMS infrastructure is fantastic (for them), they use a spare 140bytes in a message the phone is going to send to the tower as part of a 'I'm still here' message anyway - and then charge you 40p for it!
Why is this? Well it suggests to me that they want to encourage people off the old SMS infrastructure, possibly due to capacity or manageability issues, and shift them onto the much newer GPRS/3G/whatever network.
* Yes I know you can send text by MMS and I have an E71 so typing isn't a chore anyway.