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posted by janrinok on Monday October 28 2019, @06:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The scientists from R.R.R. Conservation Network attached SMS transmitters to 13 eagles to study their migration flight patterns. They aimed to better understand possible threats to the endangered Russian eagle population (the steppe eagle was listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2015).

As the birds migrated four times a day, the scientists received SMS messages with coordinates of the birds' location. They used satellite photos to see where the birds ended up, according to BBC News.

Whenever an SMS message was sent, the Russian phone company MegaFon billed the scientists.

What the scientists didn't count on was one of the tagged birds flying out of range from Kazakhstan to Iran, which ran up huge data roaming charges for the team.

An onslaught of text messages from the bird ended up costing 49 rubles each (approximately 77 cents) -- which was more than five times the expected price, and ended up exceeding the research project's budget, according to The New York Times on Saturday.


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  • (Score: 2) by EETech1 on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:12AM (1 child)

    by EETech1 (957) on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:12AM (#913183)

    They used to be free, there wasn't even a text message item on your bill.
    You had to go somewhere in the service menu on the first Nokia's.

    I used to send texts to my friends instead of voicemail for years before it was ever known to be a thing!
    People genuinely thought I hacked the phone system to send it to them, because it would show "system message" on their screen when they got it.

    Then they became a selling feature for wireless service...

    I figure keeping every single one in a telcom database is why text messages were so expensive!
    Anyone want to plot out storage cost per byte VS text message price? I'd be interested:)

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 29 2019, @10:24AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday October 29 2019, @10:24AM (#913213) Journal

    You didn't get it. I didn't say the sending costs something, I said the billing costs something. Of course, if they would not bill the SMS, those billing costs would not be there.

    Please adjust your sarcasm detector.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.