Verizon to charge for message termination

Feed the masses, threepence a time As Europe braces itself for mobile telephony without termination rates, Verizon is to start charging companies for delivering messages to its customers, while continuing to charge those customers for receiving them. Verizon has notified its OpenMarket partners, in a letter reproduced by RCR Wireless, that from 1 November they'll have to cough up three cents for every message delivered to a mobile subscriber, compared to the fraction of a cent they might be paying now. In Europe punters don't pay to receive text messages or phone calls, but in the USA contracts specify an allowance of voice minutes and text messages, with deductions made for both outgoing and incoming communications. This has meant that services such as Twitter could happily bounce SMS messages out to hundreds, or thousands,... [read full story]