Tata DoCoMo launches per-character SMS pricing, and this headline just cost us close to a rupee
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Sep 10th 2009 7:36AM
posted Sep 10th 2009 7:36AM
Never mind "nickel and diming" -- Indian joint venture Tata DoCoMo is now rupee and paising (a paise is a hundredth of a rupee) customers who sign up for its new "Diet-SMS" messaging plan. Unlimited and ultra-high-allowance messaging plans are now commonplace in some parts of the world, but on the other end of the spectrum, Diet-SMS is actually a regression from the old practice of charging by the message -- you get charged by the character. The good news is they don't charge for spaces and characters are just a single paise each, which works out to about two-hundredths of a US cent at current conversion rates -- but still, the fact remains that a 160-character SMS costs Tata DoCoMo exactly the same to handle as a 1-character one. What's worse, you just know this is going to give rise to a new ultra-efficient shorthand notation that makes "LOL" look like a novella.[Via textually.org]
Ruppee Puppy!
Repeat this 10X
Alright then..
Puppy Ruuupppee
TheyDontChargeForSpaces SeemsLikeItIsRipeForAbuse
Are you going to use spaces to do Morse code or something? Because otherwise, I'm not sure it works like that.
yesbutyourmessagestill haslotsofcharacters whichiswhatthey'rechargingby.
As the other guy pointed out, you just managed to abuse nothing at all. Congratulations.
OTOH, it is exploitable in some ways. You could, for instance, have a big set of pre-defined messages mapped like this:
. . - message 1
. . - message 2
(....)
. . - message 78 (or whatever, I didn't bother counting)
each message 'costing' only two characters (the dots). If you could find a handset which would display bare spaces somehow, you could do it for free. This might be useful for someone using it for, say, basic trading purposes. you could get cuter and do more complex character / space encodings and probably send any message at a lot less than the apparent cost, but only to people with quite a lot of practice at cryptanalysis.
What it'll likely do in practice is result in the return of telegram-style language...
bah, engadget ate my spaces. as you can probably figure out, there are meant to be different numbers of spaces between each dot pair.
huh?
Since they don't charge for spaces.....
"TheyDontChargeForSpaces SeemsLikeItIsRipeForAbuse"
would be charged the exact same as
"They Dont Charge For Spaces Seems Like It Is Ripe For Abuse"
Another reason for the ordinary Indian to stick to AirTel or Vodafone...
Or invent more abbreviations. But seriously, it's one paise per character. Is that so unaffordable?
"The good news is they don't charge for spaces and characters are just a single paise each, which works out to about two-hundredths of a US cent at current conversion rates -- but still, the fact remains that a 160-character SMS costs Tata DoCoMo exactly the same to handle as a 1-character one."
True, but...without knowing that cost, versus what they charge for a 1-character versus a 160-character, it's hard to tell where you're saving money. If you send short texts, you might save money with this. I'd say it's more fair, but, maybe it isn't...
I completely agree with this. If you think about it, since SMS is limited to 160 characters you're always paying a fee per character anyway, they're just pro-rating it for you. If their rate is low, it's actually better than what we have now in the US. Currently, if I send "k" or "lol" i get charged as if I'd sent 160 characters anyway.
Comparing the indian charging to the US charging is like comparing one ass pounding to another. I'd hardly call the US charging structure the watermark by which Tata should be judged. Recipient paying for SMSs they receive? That used to be called in letter form a 'penny insult' in Britian, where only the sender pays.
"the fact remains that a 160-character SMS costs Tata DoCoMo exactly the same to handle as a 1-character one."
Oh really?
SMS messages aren't postcards, they're pieces of data. The more you write, the more bandwidth it uses up.
They're very small pieces of data but data none-the-less. When you multiple 160 characters by the billions of messages being sent each year, the bandwidth used really adds up.
Actually Paul is right, a one-character message takes the same amount of resources as a 160 character message because it's sending the message out as a packet of a fixed size no matter how much of that packet is really used for the text of the message. The only way you use more bandwidth is if you go past the size of the packet, causing 2 to be sent instead of 1.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Seriously, check out how exactly SMS works and you'll see that either way, it's the same cost. Which is, effectively, nothing.
1paise is effectively nothing :D
Your ignoring the fact that even at 160 paise for a full message that's less than a penny per text. Talk about freaking cheap!
Sending LOL 66 times = 1 penny for them, $13.20 for most in the US without a dedicated plan(20 cents each).
You can't directly compare currency conversion like that with developing or third world countries. They may be charged less than in the US but they earn a lot less too. I was told that many of the construction workers earn around 50p per day.
@ coolblue
You've been misinformed. The price of labor is indeed low in India, but not THAT low. They need to eat.
I went there earlier this summer, and in general for the average laborer, they make anywhere from Rs. 20-40 (less than a $1) per day.
@Abhishek
Thanks for the info. To be honest I was told this information about 6 years ago so I am not surprised it is now slightly higher (although $1 is roughly 62p so I was still not that far out).
My point is the same though as we get charged roughly 10p per message but earn a significantly higher wage as even our minimum wage is over £5 per hour. I know even comparing this is futile as living costs are also far higher here which just shows how difficult it is to directly compare the prices in India to that of the US or UK etc.
100Cents=1USD=~4800Paise != 60Paise @coolblue
1Paise=(1/48)Cent != (1/200)Cent @author
coolblue is right. 50p as in 50 pence as in 0.5 GBP. The average construction worker earns about 20 to 40 INR. Which is equivalent to 0.25 to 0.5 GBP or about 25 to 50 pence. 1GBP ~= 80 INR.
Then again, construction workers don't text. Do they?
@ coolblue,
My bad. By 50p I thought you meant 50 paise (which is like half ruppee).
Tata Docomo charges 60ps for a 160 character SMS. Also per character sms is limited to 15 character. So useful only for really Short SMS
Compared to this Airtel charges me 10ps for a 160 character. Also for daily rental of Re 1 (100 paisa) u get 100 SMS (160 character SMS). Compared to these TATA Docomo is costly in India.
Also, u cant compare the call/SMS costs to US.
Here TATA docomo calls costs 1ps/second. They have second billing. You get a connection for Rs 49 ($1).
The other extreme is 10 minutes pulse by TATA Indicom. Their pulse is 10 minutes and charges Re 1 (100ps) for 10 minutes. So for around Rs6 (12 cents) u can talk for an hour.
Most other operators charge 20 paise to 50paise per minute for calls with 1 minute pulse.
When calls r so cheap, who needs SMS?
Hey ppl,
As per diet SMS, u can send at the max 15 characters...so u get charged 15paise only....u cant send a 160character'ed msg as a diet sms...chk out tatadocomo.com page....
This is exactly why it's a bad idea. BTW, you're not paying per character to comment on Engadget, so knock it off with abbreviating 3 character words.
@John
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he was going for.
i missed my S45i
Shouldn't it be "paise and rupeeing"? I mean, a nickle is less than a dime after all. Besides, it sounds better.
Well, color me surprised; nickel-and-diming isn't the thing I think about when I hear "docomo". Hope they go with the Japanese approach instead if they start operating in America.
A 160 character message with no spaces will cost you ~$.032 USD. Obviously people in poor parts of the world make less money, but this is still 6.25 times cheaper than the $.20 per message rate on ATT (and that's assuming you are paying for all 160 characters)
I think this was commonplace on the early days of SMS in Asia. In any case, US is still the backward one for charging you for receiving calls/SMS.
2ql
كل عام وانتم بخير وعيد سعيد عليكم
CORRECTION: A paisa is the hundredth of a rupee; paise is the plural form of paisa.
To save money, learn to type in UUEencoded tar.Z language. That'll teach them!