ISO 9995-8 telephone keypad diagram.
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If you live in Europe you know that the mobile operators are serious cash cows. If you live in Ireland you feel this pain pretty acutely as everything has become ludicrously dear here (isn’t this what happened in Iceland towards the end?).

The problem is that the mobile operators, like the broadband ones, have a monopoly on the infrastructure.
SMS  for instance, when measured by cost per kilobyte sent, is outrageously expensive. It costs a tiny fraction of one cent to send an email but a text message, with a minuscule 160 characters of data could cost 15 cent!

Sooner or later this business model is going to crumble. SMS is just way too dear. companies such as linxster are sniping away at the fringes.

I wrote a recent hack for using Twitter to turn Moodle forum postings into SMS messages. This no longer works in Europe. Twitter have pulled their SMS notifications here because it is too expensive. To make that hack work you now need to add Jaiku to the chain:
Moodle profile with twittermail email address >> goes to twitter account >> RSS from twitter account fetched into Jaiku >> Jaiku sends SMS to students.
This chain is too long and hence brittle.

I have another interesting hack incubating to allow students use their phones as a classroom voting system. This is similar to the clickers you can get except it you don’t need specialist equipment just a mobile.

OK stop press I just googled this and see people are already talking about such systems:

Poll Anywhere allows you to run SMS polls with up to 30 participants and only charges after that. Alas this system is not available in Ireland. Though it makes me less inclined to work on my own version of this as I suspect it will be commercially available soon (though of course mine would be free).

Take home message: SMS is expensive and people will seek out alternatives to the mobile operators
Prediction: There will be a major product in the next two years that decimates the SMS market of the established operators. Email and web are not expensive so why should SMS be?

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