New York (NY) - Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile has announced that it will raise text messaging rates from 15 to 20 cents each. Consumers will be charged for both sent and received messages and the new price puts T-Mobile in line with other mobile phone service providers like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. Those companies have been charging 20 cents a message for at least a few months.

The new rates take effect on August 29, but customers have a couple ways to alleviate the pain. For those who can endure long hold times and cranky customer service employees, they can call up T-Mobile customer service and try to get reduced or free text messaging rates. On many online phone forums, customers are reporting decent success rates in convincing company personnel to lower or eliminate the rates - this is especially true when the employees think the customer may leave for another provider.

T-Mobile is also offering a bulk message plan that could lower costs for customers. Some may argue that steering people towards these plans was the company’s intention all along. For $4.99 a month customers can send/receive up to 400 messages while $9.99 gets you 1000 messages. Very prolific texters should probably opt for the $15.00 unlimited domestic messaging plan.

Obviously, T-Mobile and the other companies wouldn’t raise the rates if they didn’t believe the public would pay for it. The phone companies have a monopoly on the medium and can practically charge anything they want. Furthermore, when you sign up for phone service, you agree to only accept text messages through your phone provider - there’s no decent way to decouple the voice and data. Competition in the data space would be great and would likely lower text messaging rates, but there’s no way to do this at this time.

Just a few years ago, text messages used to cost 10 cents each and customers were only charged when they received them. Now customers are charged for both sent and received messages, which is quite annoying because you can be easily be bombarded with messages from friends, businesses and even spammers. There’s also no decent way of opting out of receiving text messages, so you are basically forced to accept and pay for messages of dubious quality and importance.