MWS - SMS to Homepage Owner Costs?

[RichCowell]

Hiya,

I'm just wondering if the SMSs sent to the Homepage owner are free to the homepage owner?

Obviously they're free to the user, but thought I'd ask before I let users send me SMSs lol

[mconnell]

The messages don't get sent in the traditional sense of being sent.

The webserver is running on your phone, so when a person sends you a message via your mobsite the mws simply takes the incoming data and converts it into what you would refer to as a sms and pops it in your inbox.

So yes, they are free for people to send them to you. But you will still be charged for the data transfer costs of having the mws running and sending/receiving data over gprs/3g, unless of course you have a mobile contract which includes data transfer.

[RichCowell]

Hiya,

Thanks for the reply, I had hoped it would be something like that, but wanted to check before I opened it up to friends lol

It won't be costing me a penny cos I'm using it via WLAN at home and work

Thanks again for your response

[jhnwkmn]

It won't be costing me a penny cos I'm using it via WLAN at home and work

And even if you are using gprs/3G, it still might be worth while opening it up.

There are a multitude of different kind of operator contracts depending on country and other factors, but - just as an example - I checked the situation here in Finland. Using one operator's basic contract, the cost for sending an SMS is roughly 0.1€ and the cost for transferring 1MB of data is roughly 5€.

So, if you send 50 SMSs it'll cost you 5€. One SMS is 160 characters so, assuming that there is no overhead, 1MB corresponds to some 6500 messages. Since we are using HTTP for transferring that message there is overhead, of course, and let's for the sake of the argument assume that the overhead is some 900 bytes. In other words, we could fit some 1000 text messages in 1MB.

That is, it'll cost you 5€ to send 50 SMS and it'll cost you 5€ to allow other people to send 1000 textual messages to you. If you have a contract that includes data transfer and you actually use that - e.g. for browsing the web - then textual messages can be delivered essentially for free, because the amount of data transfered for a textual message is negligible compared with the amount of data you download during a regular browsing session.

Johan