Signal’s president reveals the cost of running the privacy-preserving platform—not just to drum up donations, but to call out the for-profit surveillance business models it competes against.
fully $6 million annually, goes to telecom firms to pay for the SMS text messages Signal uses to send registration codes to verify new Signal accounts’ phone numbers. That cost has gone up, Signal says, as telecom firms charge more for those text messages in an effort to offset the shrinking use of SMS in favor of cheaper services like Signal and WhatsApp worldwide.
Wtf?
OK, just so we’re clear (for those who don’t know how SMS works).
SMS shouldn’t cost much, at all, since the transport part is integral to cell management. An engineer in the mid/late 80’s realized there were unused portions of the management frames and realized he could insert some bits in there and have a process decode on each end. (IIRC this was an unassigned portion of the frame).
Ever wonder why the original SMS limit was 44 characters? Because that’s how large the unused portion of the frame was.
Yes, there’s an infrastructure cost to SMS (switches, bridges, etc), but SMS never cost telco’s even as much as a penny. So when they were charging 10¢ per, they were making 9¢+ per SMS.
Know why they switched to “free SMS” in the US? It’s several orders of magnitude cheaper for them to have customers use SMS rather than a phone call (voice connection vs the already-being-sent cell frames).
So they’re going to up charge Signal because others are using it less? Seems to me like Signal is compensating (some) for the drop in use by others.
So much BS. Telco’s are just mad because they’re losing the ability to monetize those text messages, since they aren’t encrypted. One-time-use codes don’t add anything to their surveillance.
Bastards.
Great article. Thanks, and kudos to Signal for the transparency - it’s good info about the comm industry for all us to be aware of.
As far as I know SMS still has the character limit, the processing just got smarter to break up a longer message into multiple chunks and then reassemble it correctly on the other end.
Wtf?
OK, just so we’re clear (for those who don’t know how SMS works).
SMS shouldn’t cost much, at all, since the transport part is integral to cell management. An engineer in the mid/late 80’s realized there were unused portions of the management frames and realized he could insert some bits in there and have a process decode on each end. (IIRC this was an unassigned portion of the frame).
Ever wonder why the original SMS limit was 44 characters? Because that’s how large the unused portion of the frame was.
Yes, there’s an infrastructure cost to SMS (switches, bridges, etc), but SMS never cost telco’s even as much as a penny. So when they were charging 10¢ per, they were making 9¢+ per SMS.
Know why they switched to “free SMS” in the US? It’s several orders of magnitude cheaper for them to have customers use SMS rather than a phone call (voice connection vs the already-being-sent cell frames).
So they’re going to up charge Signal because others are using it less? Seems to me like Signal is compensating (some) for the drop in use by others.
So much BS. Telco’s are just mad because they’re losing the ability to monetize those text messages, since they aren’t encrypted. One-time-use codes don’t add anything to their surveillance.
Bastards.
Great article. Thanks, and kudos to Signal for the transparency - it’s good info about the comm industry for all us to be aware of.
As far as I know SMS still has the character limit, the processing just got smarter to break up a longer message into multiple chunks and then reassemble it correctly on the other end.