With a bunch of horror stories circulating around the web, Twitter has decided to clarify its relationship with Canada’s Bell Mobility with regards to text messages. “Twitter and Bell have agreed that Bell customers on the company’s text messaging bundles will be able to receive unlimited incoming Twitter SMS messages at no extra charge,” Twitter [...]
After Twitter announced last week that it would turn SMS updates back on for Bell Mobility Canadian users, reports had indicated that Bell would charge users $0.15 for each outgoing and incoming tweet, which would have been absolutely ridiculous. (But would have been perhaps the best example yet of text messaging being a total rip-off.) Instead, you’ll be able to use your bundled text messages for Twitter at no extra charge, and for incoming texts, you’ll be able to receive an unlimited amount.
The confusion seems to stem from Bell Mobility’s own press release from a few days ago, which doesn’t appear to take into account the SMS packages that Bell offers.
Twitter hopes that this deal struck with Bell Mobility is the first of many that new director of mobile business development Kevin Thau will be able to carry out in various countries around the world. Before this recent deal with Canada, only U.S. carriers had SMS deals with Twitter that made sense from a cost perspective. That caused Twitter to shutter SMS service for much of the rest of the world last year.
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