Ref: https://help.ting.com/hc/en-us/requests/4668100
The TLDR/couldn't access - it seems rather unfair that Ting charges for inbound spam on an archaic messaging system I have no interest in using, and charges a rate 7500x that of other data just because that's how it was priced decades ago when SMS was invented. IMO this category should just be ditched unless upstream silliness with TMobile and Sprint is forcing the design. (Ironically probably part of reason so many people I know moved off of SMS)
I didn't want to keep burning help system time, but the irrationality of SMS pricing has bugged me before (thus the CGI thing mentioned in that request). I mean, it is literally piggy-backed data that started out almost entirely free and has only gotten cheaper since as data plans grew. It's entirely there as a line item to charge for "because it's a thing people use", not due to any economics of the network - it should be folded into data. If it ruins the sales page widget look, I'm sure you could come up with a way that makes Ting look even more awesome while doing so - I mean per-byte you could be allowing people thousands of SMS in the Data plan just by having the SMS button selector bump up the Data one a little.
I'd also be perfectly happy to settle for whitelisting (or no charge for inbound spam) though. I could just whitelist everybody in our contact lists and stop complaining. 😉
Comments
Oh. BTW, if anyone else has had the same thought and runs into this. The one way I deal with this to keep my SMS in the "small" bucket (it's basically impossible to go to 0 because of automated systems out there linked to my main phone number) is to sign up for a Google Voice account which comes with nice sensible free unlimited SMS 😃
Then just have as many of these accounts as possible (or the one or two people, usually on an Apple phone, who only know about SMS) use that. Basically can just use it as a chat client on your phone, like Telegram or Signal or Hangouts or Slack and with the cost going to that 4 orders of magnitude(!!) cheaper data bucket that you're probably using anyway.
Thanks for following up with that Derek! These kinds of tips are great for working around some of the network limitations. In all honesty there is little we can do as far as blocking spam traffic but we have been offering unlimited talk and text with our new plans as a way of mitigating it. The hope is definitely that the stir/shaken standards help reduce these calls and texts and put us in a position to stop spam on the major networks. For now I would suggest working with support to share feedback as you have or try/test workarounds like this handy Google Voice trick. As far as the usage goes for SMS on the legacy rates if it's just a spam message putting you past the 0 level for usage on SMS please do reach out to support as we'd be happy to take care of it for you.
Please sign in to leave a comment.