| Smart, Sun agree to cut cost of inter-texting to P0.50 |
| source : staff | |||
| Tuesday, 29 July 2008 14:34 | |||
 SMART and Sun have agreed to cut the price of sending text messages to P0.50 from P1 in response to a government call to make the service free, President Arroyo said yesterday.“Texting is a way of life. I asked the telecom [companies] to cut the cost of messages between networks and they have responded. It is now down to 50 centavos,” the President said during her State-of-the-Nation Address. Mrs. Arroyo said cutting the cost of short message services would benefit ordinary Filipinos who send at least 1.39 billion messages a day. Two months ago, Transportation Secretary Leandro Mendoza vowed to make text messaging free since it is a “value-added service” that is not covered by the phone companies’ congressional franchise. “Carriers should only charge for voice calls because in their franchise, they only pay for voice services. Text messaging is not really considered a service and should be free,” Mendoza said at the time. But during congressional hearings last month, mobile phone companies said making SMS free would hurt their earnings and result in poor service. Globe Telecom Inc.’s senior vice president, Rodolfo Salalima, said their revenues could be halved if text messaging were made free, but expressed the company’s willingness to lower interconnection rates. Roy Ibay, legal corporate counsel of dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. and mobile unit Smart Communications Inc., said competition had forced players to come up with pricing promotions to gain and retain subscribers. He said SMS was cheaper here than in other countries. In an interview yesterday, PLDT chairman Manuel Pangilinan said Smart had brought its text charges down to only 20 centavos through a number of promotional programs. “On average, our text rate is only 20 centavos,” he said. In the latest figures from Acision, the messaging and charging company of over 300 network operators and service providers worldwide, the Philippines has retained its title as the SMS capital of the world with 1.39 billion messages from a subscriber base of just over 50 million.
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A farmer who claimed to have survived military torture in 2006 on Friday haled former Armed Forces of the Philippines chief General Hermogenes Esperon Jr. |
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