Isn't it ridiculous how much can it cost to send an SMS over a cellular network? I would understand if they were sending a video message from Mars but it's a really small ASCII text message sent to a neighbor country in the 21-st century. The whole global telephone system needs to be re-designed.
Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
51–60 of 69 posts
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very interesting comment, not because I agree with it, but I think it exposes a classic left vs right wing problem, and that the attitude is applied universally instead of selectively. IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group.
> IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group. That's rather odd, because if anything I'd say the opposite is best - you can trust your ingroup to have similar values to you, and thus can afford to forgive them/be generous without being taken advantage…
It's interesting, looking at chimps and bonobos it appears that both of those general strategies is employable, with bonobos being stranger friendly and chimps being stranger averse: https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/bonobos-meal-sharing/. Not exactly the same as what is being talked about here, but doesn't seem far off - note the mention even of bonobos preferentially sharing with strangers over friends and family.
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#53Roaming prices are the equivalent of scamming tourists, I don’t think there’s any body that can prevent it internally unfortunately, it’s just somehow acceptable for companies to shake down travelers for stupid amounts of money.
Well, the EU banned them several years back. One might consider that one of its biggest legislative triumphs :D
It would be interesting to see which countries voted for and against the ban. If Italy was against the ban for example, to stop ripping off travelers, that would be amusing. :)
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#54I wonder if a virtual country code could be made for scientific inquests like this which are immune from termination and transit fees in use cases like this. Would be good for science.
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the power requirements for something like that? Since the stations are much less densely distributed than cell towers I'd expect you'd have to use a lot more energy transmitting if you'd hope to get any data. This needs to be light enough to attach to an eagle.
There are APRS transmitters built for balloons that are not much bigger than a matchbox. It's all line-of-sight at the VHF frequencies and you can get quite a good distance on a surprisingly low amount of power. 50 miles on 200mW what's is doable, longer range on less power is not uncommon if the conditionss are in your favour.
Wouldn't be surprised if matchbox size is too big already.
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#56Isn't it ridiculous how much can it cost to send an SMS over a cellular network? I would understand if they were sending a video message from Mars but it's a really small ASCII text message sent to a neighbor country in the 21-st century. The whole global telephone system needs to be re-designed.
It shouldn't cost anything at all. SMS piggybacks onto the signalling paths of GSM, which had 128 bytes unused, that can fit 160 characters. Your phone is sending & receiving those signals anyway, regardless of if you are sending an SMS message.
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#57I wonder if a virtual country code could be made for scientific inquests like this which are immune from termination and transit fees in use cases like this. Would be good for science.
The BBC article (see dupe link below / https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50180781 ) says their provider agreed to "bail them out"... I think the easiest thing for the scientists would be/have been to talk to whoever is providing the infrastructure.
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#58Roaming prices are the equivalent of scamming tourists, I don’t think there’s any body that can prevent it internally unfortunately, it’s just somehow acceptable for companies to shake down travelers for stupid amounts of money.
Well, the EU banned them several years back. One might consider that one of its biggest legislative triumphs :D
And sadly it was phone companies pretending it was their benevolence, saying "Now on our network you can roam in the EU with the same tariff as back home!".
I've read a new clause in an ad that lists the UK as one of these countries, with an asterisk that said only until the date of Brexit (obviously..).
I wonder how much of this was due to ministers being annoyed at having to change SIM cards whenever they landed in Brussels...
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#59Isn't it ridiculous how much can it cost to send an SMS over a cellular network? I would understand if they were sending a video message from Mars but it's a really small ASCII text message sent to a neighbor country in the 21-st century. The whole global telephone system needs to be re-designed.
It's not just that — SMS actually get delivered as part of the unused signalling capacity as far as the airwaves are concerned, hence the 160 7bit limitation, to fit into the existing protocols.
E.g., as far as the the costs go, I'd argue that airwaves would be most expensive in something like SMS, as it's a limited and finite resource that has to be shared by everyone within a given geographic area, yet they're basically used for free here due to the signalling already being mandatory even without SMS, so, any charge for SMS is basically pure profit by selling a resource that has to exists just for the signalling alone.
If someone knows more about how is managed between ME and the tower, please correct me if I'm wrong. There's also the cost to run SMSC (Short Message service center), but that part would be done in the cloud, and cloud is a pretty commodity resource nowadays, where these sorts of costs per message can hardly be justified, so, basically, it'll probably be the billing itself that contributes most of the cost to the cost of SMS.
P.S. Fun fact: I took a course at UWaterloo (in Canada) about the maths behind the computer networks, and during the time of the course, my professor has testified as a witness for US Government about the rising costs of SMS — https://www.c-span.org/person/?srinivasankeshav.
Re: Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's such a South African story. People will steal anything there (kind of understandable when there's so much poverty.)
They are so poor because the society has no standards, and the state is organized around cultural jingoism rather than pragmatism. They are poor because people will steal anything.
Please do not take HN threads further into ideological flamewar or nationalistic flamewar or whatever this is. It's off topic, nasty, and evokes worse. We unbanned you because you'd stopped posting comments that break the site guidelines, which is great—could you please stick to them?