Texting for Tots: A Lesson for Carrier Capacity Issues

I recently went back to Arizona to visit friends and family and had an interesting, if not terrifying, conversation with a friend of mine who has gotten her daughter a mobile phone and finding it to be quite expensive. Her daughter, it must be noted, is all of eight years old.

While it is true that Arizona seems to breed the penchant for very thin blonde types in SUVs to cut one off in traffic while chatting away on their cells, I see no reason to start the indoctrination that early. So I decided to explore the issue a wee bit further, as delicately and diplomatically as I could:

“Are you freaking kidding me?” I asked incredulously. “Are you insane?”

No, no she wasn’t kidding. And she seems relatively stable. But the problem isn’t that little Olivia is spending all of her time peering into the glowing rectangle of a games-laden smartphone. Or that she’s calling her cousins long-distance in Minnesota at peak hours. Rather, she texts her friends. All the time. Apparently, all of her little second-grade peeps have cell phones too.

“It’s gotten so bad,” her mother confided, “that she’ll sneak downstairs at five in the morning and get it off the top of the fridge where I hide it.”

Well, the phone’s not very hidden if she knows where it is, now is it? But more importantly, these kids can’t write in cursive or do multiplication yet, but they’re sophisticatedly, obsessively texting each other. One can debate the opposing viewpoints of texting as a spelling/typing practice vs. as a contributor to the death of the written language, littered as it is with all those “r u there”s, BRBs, LOLs, “what u doin”s, emoticons, LMAOs, and the assorted uses of multiple exclamation points. But any way you slice it, it’s pretty OMG, as Olivia might type.

But the OMG decidedly turns into a :-( when the billing portion of the story comes into play. They have a family plan for SMS that’s routinely exceeded by the three of them every month. Olivia racks up as many as 100 texts a day. Usually these take the form of “I like the blue princess dolphin,” or the more universal “Hey.” Hardly heady stuff, but you don’t pay by the character, you know. So my friend finds herself staring at a completely inappropriate $300 bill each month for a family, non-smartphone plan.

Hence, it’s unsurprising that carriers are absolutely loving SMS, which can scale without adding too much cost as traffic grows, and which still accounts for the majority of non-voice service usage. It’s almost money for nothing, though I suspect the MNOs would argue until they’re hoarse that this is not the case. But the lady doth protest too much: The FCC and Congress last fall asked the Big 4 cellcos to explain why texting fees have gone up so significantly, considering what a popular, voluminous and profitable service it is.

The trick of course for service providers is to capitalize in the same way on 3G services. After spending scads of money on spectrum and building out some very expensive networks on which to roll out data services, they’re finally seeing a use for the infrastructure as smartphones, widgets and the mobile Internet are driving traffic. A lot of traffic. Unlike SMS however, 3G traffic is expensive to manage and optimize, and providing QoE becomes a decidedly more difficult beast as the network finds itself straining under the weight of oversubscription. But the fees being charged for services aren’t keeping up with the cost of delivering them, making it difficult to make investments to improve the situation ... all in all adding up to a potentially teetering business model.

And the problem will only grow worse. The text-happy, grade-schooler Olivias of today will turn into the app-happy, teenage Olivias of tomorrow, after all. SMS hogs, good. Data hogs, not so much. And that’s why there’s a lot of talk about monetizing mobile broadband, of offloading traffic to Wi-Fi, of implementing tiered service plans that will make high-bandwidth subscribers pay more in proportion with their usage. But operators so far have been slow on the trigger to actually implement any of these things, let alone elegant policy management systems that can help gain control of the ever-spiraling mobile data issue.

Something has to shake loose. Network management will soon become the single-most top-of-mind issue in the Exabyte era, mark my words, and which service providers emerge on the top of the competitive heap will have nothing to do with which Android phone they offer their consumers. They must gain control over the data experience they’re offering, or risk everything.

As for Olivia, her mom decided to move her to a prepaid plan. Apparently having to be more judicious with her bon mots has made her a little peevish. And now she’s clamoring for an iPhone, which they’re considering doing. !!!!!!!! is all I have to say about that.