Telecel introduces a too-many SMSs promo to encourage people to text more

One day in the future, that we ever paid 9 cents to send 160 characters of SMS text will just be a total joke. SMS needs to die. Has needed to for a while now but refuses to yield somehow. Thanks to WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, BBM and other such internet apps though, millions of people have a cheaper alternative and the operators feel it. So how do you get all those people back using SMS? Well, give them so many SMSs it’ll be hard to resist. Too many actually. 250 SMSs a week for just a dollar, say.

Forget that even 50 SMSs a week person for any sane person is way too many. Forget that because us people don’t make such decisions rationally. We’ll send many many messages and that’s all that matters.

That’s Telecel for you there with a clever promo to squeeze dollars out of dear SMS. A new promo they just launched is promises dirt cheap SMSs they’ll surely get a lot of people texting. For just 20 cents a day you get 25 SMS messages; a dollar for 250 messages for 7 days. And, wait for it… $3 buys you 400 messages a month. They could have just said unlimited!

The catch? The messages are only valid for the stated period. i.e. if you don’t send all the 250 messages in those 7 days – poof! Like they were never there. Bring out another dollar sir! And there’s another thin, these SMSs don’t apply to international messages, so take note.

In the announcement sent to us, Telecel says to buy the SMS bundles one needs to dial *404#.

Commenting on the launch of the promo, Telecel Marketing Director Octivius Kahiya said that despite new forms of messaging, SMS remained a relevant and useful means of communication. True, there are still millions out there for whom the internet is still just a dream.