From a technology viewpoint, how does webtexting work?

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STEINER

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I have 500 free webtexts per month with my mobile phone package, handy for texting pals in UK and Oz from laptop.

Texting them from my mobile phone incurs a charge per text.

From a technology viewpoint, how does webtexting work?

The webtext has to be delivered to a mobile phone in say Oz, so presumably there is base station activity involved down under and there is no charge for this. I don't understand why webtexts are free compared to the chargeable texts sent from a mobile phone.
 
Texts cost the carrier nothing... but there is a charge imposed on the user (i.e. us) for sending them from a handset. Web texts are like a "gift" or "bonus" from the carrier... wouldn't be used as often as handset texts.
 
If you have a smart phone, down the app "Cabbage Lite" & this will allow yo to access your free webtexts.....in fact I get an extra 100 via my phone (so 600 free text altogether)

Not sure how it works with texts to people in other countries who don;t have an irish mobile number
 
If STEINER you are trying to work out why mobile networks charge for one lot of texts and not for another from laptop then that will be the million dollar question. It's simply a matter of how they have chosen to package their costs to the user. There is not necessarily a specific cost based logic to it and a lot of people consider that their profits are excessive.
 
Jazz01 said:
Texts cost the carrier nothing... but there is a charge imposed on the user (i.e. us) for sending them from a handset. Web texts are like a "gift" or "bonus" from the carrier... wouldn't be used as often as handset texts.
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That's like saying driving your car costs nothing after you've bought it!

What about the capacity the provider needs to
Provide for SMS? Licensing costs, software costs, maintenance, construction and rollout, site rental, power, interconnecting cost to other networks, power, staff...
 
@Wexfordman All of those overheads are already encompassed within the voice traffic business.

SMS costs virtually nothing so almost all of the cost charged to customers (and they used to be charged for at c. 10/12c each!) was pure profit.
 
No they are not, specific capacity is reserved for SMS signaling, it is a seperate resource (but sometimes shared), SMS messaging is not free to provide, thats just daft!
 
In the old days SMS was effectively free to provide, as they are sent embedded in the voice and service traffic in such a way that it does not use any further bandwidth, but the sheer humber of texts means that it not necessarily true any more AFAIK.

However, if you are paying 7c a text, the profit margin is enormous.

A few of the reasons are ( in completely non-technical language)

SMSs are embedded in the traffic that is already sent, sometimes in "gaps"
An SMS is a tiny amount of information, compared to a voice call
A gap of a few seconds or minutes in transmission does not matter, where-as it matters a lot in voice calls. Voice calls always take precidence and SMS wait.
SMSs are delivered on a "best effort" basis. There is no 100% guarantee that a text will be delivered. The failure rate is tiny, but there is a failure rate.

All of these reasons mean that the cost to the networks of SMS is tiny.
 
Tiny as in not free!! The same arguments could be applied to voice traffic, in that one you have dimensioned your network for the capacity required, sure it doesn't cost anything after that, but that would not be true, as all the other costs that I mentioned before are relevent! Margins are gods for mobile operators but nothing is free for them to provide, and to say any service costs nothing is very simplistic!
 
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