Nov
22
2006

texting with t-mobile

Our T-Mobile bill came with a bit of an unpleasant surprise this time around: $15 in extra text-messaging charges.

Now, Rob and I use text messaging to keep in touch with friends and with each other, and we each get SMS alerts about news events (me) and server outages (Rob). But our monthly service plan includes 400 free text messages per person, and we never use it that much.

Then we found the culprit: AOL Instant Messenger.

Apparently, T-Mobile counts each AIM message sent and received against your text messaging balance. And when Rob was in Boston and New York earlier this month, he was signed into AIM via his phone. We chatted back and forth a bit while he was away. Since I was at work, I was replying via my computer AIM client, sometimes sending my responses in the form of multiple short messages. And T-Mobile apparently counted each one.

I’ve been looking through the T-Mobile documentation online, and I haven’t been able to find anything that explicitly lays out the relationship between AIM and text messaging, only an overview of how to use the AIM feature. Worse, some of the documentation pulled up “page not found” errors, which wasn’t helpful at all. (Updated: I did some more clicking around the site and finally found this page, which had exactly the info I was looking for. A pity it didn’t come up in the site search.)

Thankfully, this didn’t come as a huge financial “gotcha,” but it’s irritating all the same. I guess at least now we know.

Tags:
Posted at 9:39 PM in business and money, personal

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Comments

i want free mobile alerts

Posted by ali on December 13, 2006 2:59 AM

More T-Mobile text-messaging fun: the price of photo/video SMSes is going down 10¢ to 15¢ … but text SMSes are going up 5¢ to 15¢. The first might be interesting if I had a cameraphone (though I suppose the price drop might in part be an effort to encourage people with cameraphones to use the MMS feature more often). The second is all the more reason not to exceed our monthly text messaging allowance and have to pay per message.

On June 1, 2007, the charge to send a picture, video, or multimedia message (MMS) to a US wireless number from the US or Canada, and the charge to receive an MMS message from a US wireless number while you are in the US or Canada, will decrease from 25¢ to 15¢ per message.

** The same day, the charge (a) to send a text or instant message (SMS) to a US wireless number from the US or Canada, (b) to receive an SMS message (including a scheduled alert) from within or outside the US while you are in the US or Canada, and (c) to receive an SMS message while you are roaming internationally, will increase from 10¢ to 15¢ per message.

** If you subscribe to a monthly messaging bundle, then each of these rate changes will apply to MMS and SMS messages in excess of your monthly allotment.

*** All per-message and messaging bundle charges are subject to applicable taxes.

One continuing pet peeve of mine with SMS and T-Mobile is that, on our joint plan, T-Mobile counts each message between Rob and I twice. If I send an SMS to Rob, it’s counted as a message sent from me, and a message received for him. Annoying.

Posted by Aly on April 20, 2007 12:01 PM

lame

Posted by ju on April 9, 2008 8:46 PM

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