To most of us, sending a text message is magic. Simply enter your short message content, select a recipient, and send. From there, the message arrives in the recipient’s inbox to be read or ignored. For this privilege, wireless customers pay about $0.20/message unless they have a prepaid package. How the message pricing is determined is essentially a black art, and the subject of a recent NYT article (registration required).
The most interesting point in the article is that once the carrier costs are covered, it doesn’t matter if a tower conveys a hundred messages or a million. While revenue per message has been falling, the volume of messages has been skyrocketing and will continue to do so.
nick Entry mobility, texting
American Airlines has introduced Mobile Boarding Pass, which allows you to avoid having to print a boarding pass at home. Instead, a link to the boarding pass is emailed to your device. You follow the link to retrieve a device-only version of your boarding pass which can be shown to security and gate personnel. Currently, you can only use this for non-stop flights from Chicago O’Hare, LAX or Santa Anna, so it’s extremely limited. The other obvious problem is showing your boarding pass after you pass through the metal detector - you can’t take your phone through the detector, so how can you show the boarding pass after you pass through?
More information on Mobile Boarding Pass can be found here.
nick Entry airlines, mobility
It can take years to build a solid reputation in any industry, especially in the phone service business. While it’s hard to recall, Sprint had a glowing reputation, with good customer service and a strong network. A number of network problems, like the Great Nextel Failure of 2006 and increasingly horrible customer service pushed customers away in droves - mostly into the arms of AT&T Wireless and Verizon.
Sprint’s looking to turn the corner after hiring former AT&T Wireless CEO Dan Hesse. USA Today ran an interview with him yesterday. While he doesn’t list many specifics outside of changing the corporate culture and reliance on WiMax in the future, he seems confident that he can stop the bleeding.
Hesse’s main focus seems to be on differentiating Sprint from other carrier. It’s not a bad plan - you always want to be disruptive. To differentiate Sprint, they should fix their customer service and capitalize on the Nextel services that so many customers left in late 2006. Devices really don’t matter. Service and pricing matters.
If Hesse can’t do it, maybe Microsoft should buy them.
nick Entry mobility, sprint