DISQUS

Shame it doesn't seem to support SMS forwarding, given you can park a wireless number with it.

Before this goes too far towards mobile-network bashing...

As you already mention the mobile-networks do waive their revenue share in special cases and support the charities in those situations (not only by waiving their fee but also with free on-portal advertising etc).

But having a policy to do this for all charities is something completely different. Just because an organisation meets the criteria to be registered as a charity, does not mean that it's automatically something that everyone will want to support. There are lots of charities that the mobile networks might not want to support - there are rabid religious charities that believe that a life of excruciating pain is better than no life at all and then those who fight for the legalisation of euthanasia - why on earth would a commercial company choose to support both?

Now... how much does it cost to send a text message to one of iTAGG's (Jersey Telecom hosted..) numbers?

Is it still something like 25p a pop from T-Mobile?

Can you buy the SIM w/o the dongle? Ie for people visiting the UK for a few days who already have an [unlocked] dongle or bluetooth enabled phone?

Heh... the only people who ever mention broadband connections are those that aren't pleased with them.

Mine in West London is *great*. I've been with Be pretty much since they launched... their "up to 24 MBit" service syncs at about 12 Mbit at home and I have never, ever failed to get less than 1 megabyte per second of throughput from suitable sources. Fantastic value.

We have one of Be's business lines (basically identical to what I've got at home) at work amongst other connections. I see similar performance here too - it doesn't blink an eyelid even when 40 GB backups are thrown over at a constant 1.2 megabytes per second.

Sounds like he's pay as you go. If Mr Hanlon chooses to spend his, seemingly generous, prize using mobile data then he'll be able to use, at most 51 MB of GPRS traffic per day - just over 1.5 Gigabytes per month.

(29.70 EUR for the 99c/day to get you 50 MB per day and the remaining 470.3 EUR for another 23 MB @ 2c/kilobyte). Hrm.

This mean I can buy a £120 O2 SIM that'll give me unlimited 3G data for a year? Bargin!

Can confirm that this *is* possible and several of the UK networks will do it if requested (can't remember which ones off the top of my head but 99% sure that Vodafone is in the list).

In terms of whether people will be able to tell that their messages are going through... that's a better question. I've no idea on what percentage of normobs use delivery receipts. In any case all they'd find, if they do, is that they'd immediately receive a Failed receipt - but not the cause of that receipt.

Whoopy-doo.

News story casuses people to communicate with each other. Who'd have thought?

Are we going to have a similar story with laughable figures (see update on the original post where they've backed down on their numbers) for every big news story?

I'm sure that if you compared the traffic spike after say a terrorist attack or natural dissaster then it'd be orders of magnitude bigger than Obama's text - are we going to see "Tsunami makes Sprint $xxxm" headlines?

This is fascinating... you have to wonder whether Mapesbury have some secret agenda in bringing this to market. If it were April 1st then I'd be convinced.

Ignoring all the fucked-company signs from the outset (.mobi, the stock photo thing, missing pages, typo'd html, EMEI when they mean IMEI, etc etc etc) the service is clearly rubbish. Presumably with the hope to eventually be able to offer "poor" coverage (rather than none at all), from base stations located on an already diminishing number of vandalism-prone phone boxes. Then you've either got to muck about changing SIMs, or, if you don't want to do that you can instead mess around with the settings on the handset, which amounts to much the same thing; ignoring the fact that they presumably have NO WAY WHATSOEVER to authenticate the handset.

Sure changing the IMEI of a handset is illegal; but it's also technically trivial.

Who would fund such a thing?

I've used Orange for the past decade... and have no plans to move away. Not because of their service, pricing or anything like that - one simple reason: Line 2.

Wish other operators would offer this feature!

With Texperts - yes. But I think AQA charge for submitting the question, not receiving the answer.

18 quid - two of his questions were over 160 characters...