China Practically Unreachable By Western SMS? 258
Ainsy writes "A friend of mine recently began a placement as an English pronunciation teacher in China. She has picked up a pay-as-you go sim for use over there, only to discover that China seems to have been almost completely overlooked by international communications agreements, specifically from the UK. A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone. SMS in China is upscaling massively, and is incredibly cheap currently — even 'premium' SMS info services cost 1 Yuan (that's just £0.081 GBP). I'm curious why such a large section of the world market is cut off from the west's wireless communication networks especially with the recent Olympics putting the spotlight on the nation in general.
China mobile is the world's largest carrier ranked by subscriber base (415 million) and isn't even the only carrier to operate in China). There are a few websites around from which SMS can be sent to China for a fee but this is of only limited use when on the move. Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"
Is this for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"
Here's an answer to your second question: NEVER
Here's an answer to your first question: Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?
Perhaps a more pragmatic answer would be that China will allow text messages to enter into the country when it's able to monitor and censor every text message, and connect a sender to a recipient with their name and current location (to allow for quick and easy arrests), and know who to detain when they enter the country.
Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly what I thought. Blaming "the rest of the world" is idiotic. Sending SMSes to China requires a cross-connect agreement, which means both sides have to agree to connect. Why does the author think it's nothing to do with the Chinese themselves?
Mutual agreement (Score:2)
Blaming "the rest of the world" is idiotic.
I'm not convinced: I think it is by mutual arrangement. The Chinese government do not want outsiders informing the Chinese what their government is up to and the Western phone companies don't want the Chinese to inform their subscribers what they are up to: fleecing their subscribers for all they can with things like massively inflated SMS prices.
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Yeah, because we know that SMS messages are way more valuable than a phone call or email.
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Ive never had any issues with receiving SMS on China Mobile. I suggest the author get a decent service provider because this problem has never existed for me.
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Nonsense, unless the cost of phone calls and emails in China are, what, millions of times what it is in the US?
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Why?
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I don't know, how many 10 cent SMS messages can you fit in your phone calls?
Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Here's an answer to your first question: Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text
> messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?
There can't be an easier to control method of communication than SMS. You need a carrier in your country which delivers the messages to phones, which will be forced to allow monitoring; the messages are 160 characters each and text-only; the phone they're being sent to can be trivially geographically located etc. If you're going to keep a close eye on your subjects, you're going to watch to encourage SMS over any other system.
It's exactly like in the UK/US, where all companies involved in communication (phone, parcels/mail, tv, radio) are controlled completely by their governments - there's no way of sending information without the authorities knowing who sent it to who. Encryption is something of a false hope, given that countries will either prohibit it or, slightly more sensibly, pass laws empowering courts to punish subjects for not revealing their passwords and/or decrypt the messages on demand.
anonymous mail is possible (Score:5, Insightful)
It's exactly like in the UK/US, where all companies involved in communication (phone, parcels/mail, tv, radio)
In the US it is legal to send mail up to 13 ounces without a return address. It is legal to send mail over 13 ounces without a return address but you have to hand-deliver it to a post office box and your face will typically be caught on camera. That's to prevent bombs and the like, not contraband information.
In the USA, it's also legal to use a pay phone or a prepaid phone call without revealing your identity. You will reveal your location, so make sure you call from a relatively populated place that is devoid of cameras.
For some, anonymity is a valuable commodity: Some people are willing to pay $10-$20 for a single phone conversation in exchange for anonymity - that's the approximate cost of a cheap prepaid cell phone with 10-20 minutes of talk time.
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It is legal to send mail over 13 ounces without a return address but you have to hand-deliver it to a post office box and your face will typically be caught on camera. That's to prevent bombs and the like, not contraband information.
Well, that's the excuse. The reality is that it's to ensure full employment for thousands of members of the Letter Carriers' union. If it's illegal to send packages anywhere except at the post office, then you have to have people manning the windows...
Re:anonymous mail is possible (Score:4, Interesting)
In the USA, it's also legal to use a pay phone or a prepaid phone call without revealing your identity. You will reveal your location, so make sure you call from a relatively populated place that is devoid of cameras.
For some, anonymity is a valuable commodity: Some people are willing to pay $10-$20 for a single phone conversation in exchange for anonymity - that's the approximate cost of a cheap prepaid cell phone with 10-20 minutes of talk time.
No, you're buying an illusion of anonymity. With modern call log pattern analysis systems, intelligence services can determine your identity from your calling patterns, not the number from which you happen to make the call. The rough geographical location they get from the cell phone companies is just the icing on the cake. This kind of pattern matching is well suited to automation and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if every cell phone in every country with a decent intelligence service was subject to such analysis.
One would also expect pre-paid "anonymous" cellphones to be subject to additional "identity guessing" analysis since they are an obvious option for "anonymity" that the naive crook might take. With a bit of data sharing and international cooperation, I bet they can track people as they move around the world from cellphone to cellphone.
Basically, if there is any kind of pattern at all to your cell phone use - and there almost certainly is - cell phones are not "safe", no matter what. The same, of course, goes for people thinking that going to an internet cafe and thinking that their web browsing is somehow hidden. Fact is, if you log on at an internet cafe and then do the same 10 things you always do, that narrows the scope of your likely identity down like 6 orders of magnitude. Wow, thinks the computer, this session at this net cafe looks very similar to the guy at this home address. And boy, it's geographically pretty close. Likelihood: 85%. Save.
If someone is watching at the telecoms/ISP level, and you can be sure they are if you're in a UKUSA country, then your identity is likely derivable from patterns of usage, not the registered owner of that IP/number/whatever.
Sucks doesn't it. Anyway, it is possible to communicate anonymously, but it's a lot more work than just buying a prepaid. In fact you basically cannot use the phone system at all. You have to think a lot more like them, though, if you really want to escape the pattern matching dragnet.
On the bright side, SIGINT is pretty high level stuff. The intel agencies are not going to be giving away this kind of info to the police, who will just overuse it and kill the golden goose - at most they'd send a tip or two in politically important cases, I guess. One would hope that the top-level intel agencies are fairly responsible with the awesome data they have and you'd have to be a pretty bad guy for them to actually act on info from pattern matching surveillance.
Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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No communication is NOT communication.
And snooping on 2 people NOT communicating is sure as hell going to get you far less information than snooping on 2 people communicating.
Not to mention all those wonderful causes for search and seizure, arrest and imprisonment. Not necessarily in that order.
Like "We have proof that you have been communicating with foreign powers that are conspiring against our beautiful land."
Completely? Really? (Score:2)
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Re:Is this for real? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oooh, scary. Did you even read the summary? "A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone." If it's already possible via Vodafone, that indicates it's a business rather than government issue.
Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Interesting)
China Mobile _could_ allow anyone to send for free on their network, but frankly, very few people (relatively speaking) care. In a country so big and self-dependent, international texting doesn't matter.
Opening up free internet based SMSs does little other than open up a HUGE hole for people to commercialize on China Mobile's service. China Mobile, being a government owned corporation, wants to ensure that it holds a monopoly on innovation on its network. This is largely why you see very little new things in terms of SMS happening in China, because if someone attempted anything, China Unicom would simply block their service and duplicate it.
It's not about rights, it's all about money
PS: Skype can send to Chinese phones (I'm in China so I've looked into this)
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Working in telecom for the last few years, I think you are speculating.
This sort of things more often than not happens because of lacking business arrangements. A simple thing as sending a SMS involves agreements at a business level as well as at a technical level.
Often providers are cheap and they don't want to pay a clearing house to handle international SMS, they need to do this to stay competitive in the local market at the expense of borderline cases. This could be your UK provider or the Chinese one.
S
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For each SMS containing a banned word, simply forge a second SMS from the same sender that says "Just kidding."
Seems to work fine for their main "firewall."
Occam's razor says that it's not censorship.... (Score:2)
SMS in China is upscaling massively, and is incredibly cheap currently â" even 'premium' SMS info services cost 1 Yuan (that's just £0.081 GBP).
it might be that there's no revenue sharing pact between local phone companies and the foreign mobile companies regarding text messages.
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I call BS on the second argument.
SMS is no more private than webmail, and in some cases, even less so. There are anonymous webmail providers out there. There is no equivalent for SMS.
Besides, China doesn't have to monitor and censor every message, only the ones from the outspoken people. China's "free speech" is only a little worse than in the US; you can say all you want about the government, but just not too loudly. The only difference is that you can't get jailed for that infraction alone in the US, thou
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Was in China for three weeks recently using global roaming and found that around half of my messages heading out of China were not received by the intended recipient at all. I do suspect, however, that I was charged for them.
My brother, first using roaming, had a problem whereby messages would send 3-12 times each. He then switched to a local sim and we believe that all messages from that point were sent/received OK.
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How is 8p (~15 cents) incredibly cheap?
He says that's the cost for a 'premium' service, whatever that is. I've never used one myself (a normal SMS in the UK is anywhere from 0p to about 10p, depending on the provider).
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Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Informative)
What are you talking about? SMS certianly does support Chinese characters, as there are literally BILLIONS of text messages been sent in China each day, almost all in Chinese. All cell phones sold in China contains an input program that allows input of chinese characters using ordinary keypad.
The main reasons for lack of interconnect between foreign phone carriers and Chinese carriers could be either government censorship, or inability of the carriers to come to an agreement on what's reasonable price to charge.
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What are you talking about? SMS certianly does support Chinese characters, as there are literally BILLIONS of text messages been sent in China each day, almost all in Chinese.
Mod parent up.
Wife's Ukrainian cellphone expects entry in Cyrillic, with autocomplete.
There is absolutely no reason to suspect that Chinese cellphones don't speak Chinese. Heck, we're lucky they speak English, given the relative size of the markets.
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It may be possible to send chinese characters over SMS, but that does not mean any western phone supports displaying those characters.
Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Informative)
How on earth was this rated +4, insightful? It's patently retarded. I think a lot of people just score up anything that's longer than a few paragraphs without actually reading it.
I live in Malaysia where people send Chinese text messages all day long. I get them now and then as wrong numbers (my friends know I don't read Chinese). When I travel to Thailand I get Thai SMS spam on my phone all damn night long when I'm trying to sleep.
I did not install any special software or do anything special to my phone; it just worked. Worked with my previous phone too.
When I set my phone's input language to Chinese, the number of characters I can type per SMS charging unit changes from 160 to 70. A few seconds of googling based on that discovery turned up the fact that SMS messages can be encoded in UCS2 which allows most if not all Unicode characters. Read here: http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/ [dreamfabric.com] for more than you ever wanted to know about the message format.
Re:Is this for real? (Score:5, Informative)
Everything you say is still wrong.
UCS2-encoded SMS is a standard and works between handsets and networks. You honestly think that the billion Chinese speakers have all segregated themselves by handset maker, and Nokia users only SMS with other Nokia users? It's a preposterous notion and obviously false.
The "lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks" hasn't been demonstrated. It's been asserted and then met with scores of counterexamples in this discussion. I myself have carried a phone to some 50 countries in the past few years, most of them poor and haggard, and my phone has worked in all of them (except Japan and Korea, where I had to rent at the airport). China included. I have received welcome messages and spam in the local scripts, as well as roaming info messages from my own Malaysian carrier in English. My friends have SMSed me and the messages have instantaneously appeared on my phone.
SMS messages may cost you a pretty penny, but it doesn't mean they're expensive in the abstract. My carrier charges me a flat EUR0.04 per outbound international text no matter where it's to, and they are making a profit doing it. So the raw cost (whatever they pay to the SMS exchange company) is clearly less than that.
What I think we have here, is an OP whose own carrier had some sort of problem exchanging messages with one number in China when he tried once or twice. Which is more forgivable than you, who are pulling cardinal nonsense straight out of your arse based on nothing at all.
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I simplified for the sake of brevity.
I travel with two phones. One holds my home SIM, and one gets a prepaid SIM.
T
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Somehow I don't really think that has anything to do with being nationalistic and more about not being able to write characters in your native language.
You think SMS would be used here if it only supported cyrillic?
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While anglophones are quick to suggest "Just Learn American!", that probably isn't going to work out so smoothly. If the western computer and telecommunications industry expects China to fit into the english/ASCII/QWERTY mould, they are probably going to be disappointed. The reality is that sooner or later, western tech is going to have to fit into the China mould. Otherwise, the Chinese will fill that mold themselves.
The sad part is that it would most likely be easier for the Chinese to adopt English rathe
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Are you posting from 1975? What you talk about was solved decades ago already.
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Nope, you are completely wrong.
SMS is very popular in Japan and China. And, international interoperability between many U.S. carriers and China is going quite well. I know because I work for a company that makes it possible. We have millions of SMS and MMS messages flowing through our servers to many different countries.
Most cell phones are loaded area specific alphabets, so Greek, Cryllic, and even Arabic is available on phones. I know because I worked for a major international cell phone manufacturer and
Spam (Score:2, Interesting)
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Slightly more prosaically, I think many cell phone providers would not know what to do once messages in Big5, GB2312 and UTF-8 start arriving, crashing the outdated phones they subsidize expensive plans with.
Better then, as they see it, to disallow messaging to/from China, Korea and Taiwan.
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From what I can tell, the cell phone versions that do support Asian languages are equipped with more memory than their latin-only counterparts. And a penny saved...
Re:Spam? top spammers are: (Score:3, Informative)
reality looks like this:
USA 1590
China 442
Russia 304
SouthKorea 201
UK 184
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso [spamhaus.org]
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/spammers.lasso [spamhaus.org]
no comment!
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Americans. Who do you think?
Heh, no, I'm kidding of course. It must be the evil communazis.
Re:Spam (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually most of the "Chinese" spam does not originate there. It's paid for by American spammers, to sell American products. See the ROKSO list if you have any doubts.
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Just think of how bad text message spam would be if those tricksy Chineses were able to reach us?
The Western phone companies would love to pass on Chinese spam at a price of 10c or more per SMS...
I doubt the spammers will find that very attractive.
Monopoly of China mobile (Score:5, Interesting)
China Telecom & China mobile are no longer actual monopolies, but still control enough of the market to be very monopolistic in nature.
You can expect SMS interoperability...never, and the last I heard, they were pissed off with the potential of skype-like services cutting into their profits and were going after skype-out with great vengeance and furious anger.
Censorship (Score:2, Funny)
Wow. Don't follow international politics much, do you?
Shenanigans! (Score:5, Informative)
I write this from a small city in Fujian province (the south of China), and can tell you from experience that O2 and T-Mobile can also send SMS messages from the UK to my China Mobile PAYG phone here. It sounds to me like your friend has a bad phone...
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No problem sending messages from Verizon in the US to China, either. Doesn't look like Verizon even overcharged me for it, which is really out of character for them.
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WRONG - I have sent and received text messages from people in the PRC, I do not use Vodafone.
I'm curious why such a large section of the world market is cut off from the west's wireless communication networks especially with the recent Olympics putting the spotlight on the nation in general.
WRONG - It's not. Since when did SMS become "the west's wireless communicat
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Germany - China worked just fine, too. This whole story is just FUD.
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Germany - China worked just fine, too. This whole story is just FUD.
Uh, no it's not. It's not Fear, it's not Uncertainty, and it's not Doubt. It's not designed to scare people away from a viable product. It's wrong and it's a dumb SlashDot story, but not everything that is dumb is FUD.
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I don't know what caused the poster to see what they saw, but Chinese government oppression was certainly not the cause in this case.
Re:Shenanigans! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you go to Poland are you forced to send messages only in Polish? No?
Same for China.
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You're wrong on so many levels.
First, there are many Chinese (even 1% out of 1.4 billion is still 14 million) who can perfectly talk and understand English. So, sending an English SMS message to them is perfectly fine.
Then, if the poor Chinese is confined to a phone with old styled 0-9*# keyboards, or QWERTY keyboards, he can type Chinese via input methods - basically he'll key in code sequences representing Chinese charac
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Yeah, you do realize you're talking to a real, actual Chinese person in English?
Stop it with your lies! The parent says that you can not communicate in English! Clearly you are! You must cease.
Re:Shenanigans! (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to say primary schools aren't that popular in the poorer areas in China, you can just look at the numerous primary schools collapsed in the recent Sichuan earthquake - Sichuan isn't a particularly rich area in China. Basic education is available in most rich and poor areas of China. Finding a primary school in the middle of deserts or high mountains isn't easy, still, but not many people live in those places. If there's a people problem with SMS in China, it would be the mostly illiterate people of the older generation - those who never had a chance to go to school when China was poor, and are not going to school now because they're already old. They can't even read Chinese characters, much less typing in the pinyin. But how are you going to help them if they don't want to go back to school?
Unicode would be nice, yes. We have two different character sets for Chinese characters here - big5 for Traditional Chinese and GB for Simplified Chinese. Pain in the ass if you received an SMS from a person in Hong Kong who uses big5 - the message appears garbled because your phone decodes it in GB. But we can still fallback to English in that case.
Conspiracy (Score:2, Insightful)
I do believe it is a conspiracy by telecom companies not to spend money on something that they don't anticipate making a profit from.
Canada to China SMS - OK (Score:5, Informative)
Not an issue in Canada. Both Rogers (China Mobile and China Unicom) and Bell (China Mobile) support sending SMS to china
Souce
http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-text/international_txt
http://www.bell.ca/shopping/en_CA_ON.info/VasInternationalTextMsg.details?tab=SPECS
I think that (Score:2)
it's fairly amazing that international SMS works at all. Although it's a simple protocol, there are a lot of moving parts in between it would seem.
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it's fairly amazing that international SMS works at all. Although it's a simple protocol, there are a lot of moving parts in between it would seem.
I'll tell you why international SMS (and, for that matter, international telephony in any form) works - both in terms of roaming and in terms of making calls to international numbers.
Money.
There is nothing intrinsic involved in roaming which costs a lot of money - it costs the operators fractions of a penny to support a single call or transmit a single message.
This is why roaming is so commonly available. The prices that are charged (both by the network you're roaming in to your own operator and by your op
Chinese Government's Reply (Score:4, Funny)
Open communications and expresion is in China's future and always will be.
SMS is doing what? (Score:4, Funny)
I may be at a disadvantage as a native English speaker, but what the heck does "upscaling massively" mean?
Is this some bizarrely twisted Babelfish translation of "becoming very popular"?
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What's more surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The editors accepting this is just part of the recent decrease in quality of
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The Universal HD (which is essentially NBC AFAIK) coverage of the Olympics was actually pretty good at being country non-specific. I mean, sure it scheduled stuff that had slightly more US contestants than everyone else, but I actually enjoyed watching a good number of events where USians weren't involved or not really in contention.
But, of course, the network TV and basic cable stations had basically all the "standard", LCD American interest events, which tend to be boring (to me at least). I really enj
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Slashdot has been streamlined and optimized based on user feedback and eliminated all articles from front-page news headlines.
This provides two unique benefits:
1) No one can copy articles in their entirety into posts.
2) No one can correct the summary and tell the editors to RTFA.
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I recall not so long ago that there were time if I wanted to talk to certain people I had to walk down the street because these certain people did not even have a phone. Now we are so used to universal communication that if we can't text from the top of kilimanjaro we think there is a conspiracy afoot.
I live in an urban
Depends on your carrier's Inter-Carrier SMS vendor (Score:5, Informative)
Try Skype (well, the windows version) (Score:2)
It's not just China (Score:3, Interesting)
In Russia, I have a friend with the opposite problem. She can send SMS to me with no problem, but I cannot send SMS to her. Basically T-Mobile (my provider) says that her company (Megafon) has problems accepting SMS from T-Mobile and they (Megafon) aren't interested in fixing it. T-Mobile says it is an issue Megafon has to fix. So the only way that I could send SMS to my friend was to use Megafon's website which allows you to send SMS via the web to their customers.
Note that this has all been true for years and has nothing to do with the Georgia-Russia situation. Ukraine has excellent relations with the USA and nobody knows why one of their major mobile phone providers refuses to allow its customers to send SMS to the USA while the other one has no such restrictions, but that's how it is. A wise man once said "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" or something like that.
Can't censor SMS messages (Score:2)
A number of posters have already responded to this.
Contrary to what some people will tell you, SMS messages are safe. They are not cached or stored anywhere. I happen to know that the BILLING for SMS messages eats up an order of magnitude more bandwidth and storage space than the messages themselves. The companies that do SMS billing run on a shoestring and can just barely handle the billing capacity. They aren't even CONSIDERING any eavesdropping because doing so would require massive SMS caches that they
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I ask because I know that many services use store and forward, that most SMS and MMS services use SMTP to transfer messages, that the ICS I work for does a lot of billing for all their customers.
Who do YOU work for? I assume you're not saying for the same reason I'm not. I worked for two ICS companies as a contractor. I built databases and did infrastructure so I don't know the nitty-gritty of how they transferred messages around. What I do know is what I said, the bandwidth for the billing greatly exceeded the bandwidth for the actual text messages and they had nowhere near the storage capacity necessary to cache SMS (MMS wasn't very big back then) messages for any length of time. "Store and forwa
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I think they might also have been doing billing for ringtones and crap like that which is why the billing bandwith was so high. Even so, just looking at the traffic it seemed like the billing for SMS ate up more than SMS itself. This has probably changed with more bulk plans.
1 RMB is too expensive (Score:2)
1 RMB for an SMS is still too expensive, when you consider that it costs nearly nothing to send an SMS.
doh! (Score:2)
Good point. In the US you have to charge more than that for a month's service because the paperwork for a service item probably costs more than 15 cents (~1 RMB).
not PAPERwork, but paperWORK (Score:2)
I didn't mean literally paperwork. I mean the process of administering it. my cell phone bell has been web-based for a good 6 years now. I can get information on my account via SMS here in the US, but I can't actually pay or transfer money with SMS. (but I can with a decent web-enabled phone)
I send SMS all the time (Score:2, Interesting)
Currently I live in the USA and my fiancee lives in Beijing. In the USA I have Verizon Wireless as my cell phone provider, and I'm not sure what company my fiancee uses in Beijing (her cell phone starts with 86 13).
I have no problems sending or receiving SMS messages with her at all hours of the day and night. She has never failed to receive an SMS text from me, nor I her.
I have seen no evidence that there is a problem sending or receiving SMS to China.
Tom
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I have also do no have any problems using Verizon Wireless to send text message into and out of Main Land China, the city is Shen Zhen specifically.
Skype also work excellent for voice and text messages to and from China.
I don't think there is really any problem just some phone carriers here and maybe over there just don't have there act together.
I have been looking into this for a while... (Score:2, Informative)
SMS is a rip (Score:2)
If the phone isnt a total piece of shit, and the service isnt crap, then it has at the very least a POP email client, and enough Internet access to use it.
Email is free - why the hell would anyone who isnt a clueless teenager whos parents are paying the bill or a complete ignoramus pay 20cents per 120-character message to use SMS?
Those wily Chineses!!!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in Japan.
I can't get SMS from people who aren't on the same carrier, let alone in another country.
In fact, I was really surprised recently to find out that anyone could SMS people in other countries (I knew the same-carrier business was just Japan).
This has absolutely nothing to do with "West" vs. "East." It's different companies deciding what services to offer or not. Sheesh.
Those gymnasts were 016 (Score:4, Funny)
The Chinese use octal. They just love the number 8.
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(Ok so I'm a pedant that did a bit of PDP-8 programming, they use octal).
The number "8" doesn't show up in octal. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12....
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iPhone's writing pad is obivous - you write Chinese characters with your hand on it, and switch back to the keyboard if you need to input alphanumeric characters. For the fixed keyboards you get something called "input methods" - basically you input a few keys according to some pattern (e.g. you type in the word's pinyin [wikipedia.org], o
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So, I'm out in the middle of nowhere. My cell phone has a weak signal, enough to show up on the network but not enough to support an understandable conversation. I need to tell some people where I am. Instead of using SMS to give them my coordinates, I should _____________. (Please fill in the blank here.)
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Nice straw man there, did you build it yourself?
The person I responded to said, "There are far better FREE mobile messinging techs out there".
Well, I'm not aware of any free mobile messaging technology which is better than SMS in the particular aspect that I discussed. If there is one, I would really like to know about it.
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I "conveniently" trimmed my quote because that was the portion that I was responding to. I'm not saying that this is why it's insanely popular. I'm simply saying that there are ways in which SMS is simply the best service available. These supposedly better technologies are not, in fact, better in every way. The fact that SMS's key advantage has nothing to do with its popularity is irrelevant to what I'm saying.
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I don't see it as a straw man at all. If you mean "far better for the common uses of SMS", you ought to say so.
The purpose of my post was two-fold. First was to point out why SMS can be very useful in ways that other things can't. Second was to find out if, in fact, there was some wonderful technology I didn't know about that was better than SMS even for this scenario.
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We use it because it's built into the phone, it works with every phone no matter how old and crappy, it's supported pretty much everywhere, and the people we are communicating with already know how to use it.
I have been many places where there was simply no data service available via the cell networks (at least that I could come up with - let me know if you know how to get online in Syria using a prepaid SIM). But I've never been anyw
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Sure if you both have smartphones with data plans you can send an email or IM message instead, but most people have dumbphones with no real data plan, so SMS is really the only option. That's why providers can get away with charg
What's it like living in 1986? (Score:2)
COMMUNIST country? Damn, what kind of silly question is that? Seriously, where have you been hiding the last 60 years or so?
China isn't a communist country in anything but name and hasn't been for a long time. Where have *you* been hiding the last 20 years?
China is- in many respects- less socialist, let alone communist, than the United States in areas such as education and healthcare. A far more accurate description would be (as someone else said) "the world's first mature fascist economy".
That's fascism as in blending the interests of the state and commerce to serve each other, exploiting nationalism, etc. etc.
Granted, the reins are loosening
And the Sovie
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Chinese SMS messages are entered with pinyin [wikipedia.org] (at least on my phone). You type on the roman-alphabet keyboard and get Chinese characters. For example, type 'bei' and then it shows you all the different characters that match, and you scroll to select one. A bit more tedious than typing in a European language but my Chinese friends seem to zip right along.
My phone also seems to support a stroke-based method of entering Chinese characters but I have no idea how that works. I've only ever seen people using the
OMFG c3nz0rZ! (Score:3, Insightful)
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It was the same for me.
The problem is nothing to do with China and everything to do with the United States shitty cellphone networks.