Verizon Wireless considers extra text fee

Verizon Wireless is considering increasing the per-message fee it charges companies that send text alerts. But Jeffrey Nelson, a Verizon Wireless spokesman, said the price hike has not been finalized. Still, he acknowledged that Verizon Wireless has been discussing ways to offset increased costs associated with heavy volumes of SMS text messaging on its network. "We are currently assessing how to best address the changing messaging marketplace, and are communicating with messaging aggregators, our valued content partners, our technology business partners and, importantly, our friends in the nonprofit and public policy arenas," he said in an e-mail. "To that end, we recently notified text messaging aggregators--those for-profit companies that provide services to content providers to aggregate and bill for their text messaging programs--that we are exploring ways to offset significantly increased costs for delivering billions upon billions of text messages each month." Even the mere thought that Verizon is considering upping rates on text messaging is enough to get people worked up, especially since Verizon and the other three major wireless operators in the U.S. have increased the price of sending and receiving texts for consumers by 100 percent over the past two years. Rates have gone from 10 cents a message to 20 cents per message.