All the Texts, Without All the Costs
Mobile customers are looking for ways to save on their cell phone bill. Some spend over one thousand dollars in texting alone! Frank Radice, the former president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences says he uses free texting apps like TextNow and Skype IM. Most phone companies charge 20 cents per outgoing text and 20 cents for receiving a text. These charges create an estimated 20 billion dollars a year in revenue for the mobile industry, as well as many unhappy customers. The emergence of mobile texting apps, most recent being Apple’s iMessage, allow users to text free. While each mobile texting app has its own format and ease of use, they all work on the principle of sending and receiving texts via cellphones’ data streams. Traditional texts are sent over their own channel, a channel separate from voice and data channels. A single data text message sent via a texting app uses no more than 160 bytes of data. Most cell phone data plans are 2 billion to 10 billion gigabytes. TextFree application allows users to text from laptop computer, iPod Touches, and iPads. These free texting apps are supported by advertising. Ads flash at the bottom of the screen as messages are being types, but recipients see nothing but the text. Textfree apps even have a feature for people to remove the apps, charging a measly six dollars per year to remove adds completely. Registered users get a new phone number for texting. Texts sent to this number are automatically forwarded to your cellphone. The negative of textfree apps are that some friends have to text to a different number. Another alternative to paid text messaging are instant message apps such as iMessage, Skype IM, Kik, Google Talk, Facebook Messenger, and GroupMe. Instead of instant message phone number, you receive a user name. Google Voice also offers unlimited texting to anyone in the United States. The only drawback is that it cannot accommodate picture texts.
The topic is related to the course in a few ways. One example is the concept of text messaging in terms of strong and weak networks. Every text message between two people A and B, or nodes A and B, demonstrates a strong linkage between these two people. Lets assume that node A and node C text each other and create another strong linkage. This indirectly creates a weak linkage between nodes B and nodes C. This network trio satisfies the strong triadic closure property. Another example that we can relate to is the concept of largest strongly connected component. We can map the entire mobile texting customer network and observe that the largest texting network may be in New York City. Also, if we do a game theory comparison of the payoffs of free texting app versus normal mobile texting, we can see what a certain player would decide to go with based on which one maximizes his payoff.