The statement that this will only affect the 5% of wireless customer without a SMS bundle is simply not true. A large majority of wireless customers are not on a bundle, and therefore subject to the new fees. Although, many of them never send or receive text messages.

A recent US survey identified 15% of users as regular (weekly or more. Canadian behaviour has been comparable in the past.

The 5% number is a by-product of people not understanding the stats. It derived from comments early in the story by a Bell spokeperson who said, accurately, that 95% of text messages sent are on a bundle and then inferred, incorrectly, that only 5% of customers would be affected.

Usage of MSS is heavily skewed (as is voice calling and broadband usage and virtually every other similar service). A small percentage of customers produce a large percentage of the traffic. As such, the 95% of messages referred to are based on, maybe, 10%-20% of customers. Add some others who use little SMS but have messages bundles with other features and — at best — 20%-30% of customers are on a bundle.

The remaining 70%+ customers are subject to the incoming SMS fees… which, of course, is the point of introducing them.

To be fair, I don’t think this was a deliberate lie by the Bell spokesperson. Based on other comments by Bell people, I think this misunderstanding is widespread even within the company. On the other hand, someone there knows it is wrong and has allowed this error to stand.

Laws of supply and demand indicate that the carriers are behaving as they should…optimizing their position…not sure that “providing consumers with affordable ways to access a tsunami of new and devices” is what the investors of carriers would want them to do…although it would nice for consumers…competition is a powerful ally for consumers…

Yeah, Twitter might have us hooked on SMS but then again, we just now move over to data and not SMS. Charging for incoming SMS is probably one of the reasons Canada still gets them but over here in GErmany we do not pay for simple SMS. Introduce that and we will just go mobile. No mobile available? We will push wifi.

Telefone carriers could make another big boom out of this, but insisting on old ridiculous pricing structures is not going to move us towards using them – but finding better alternatives.