“Why are we making these changes?”

“Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send
updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to
ten followers, you aren’t charged ten times–that’s because we’ve
been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to
the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in
popularity, so too would the price.”

So well done Twitter; but why should Twitter have to do so? Why can’t the telecommunications companies make concessions and sacrifice a tiny bit of the gargantuan profit in good faith?

“Our challenge during this window of time was to establish
relationships with mobile operators around the world such that
our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective.
We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States.
We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without
passing along operator fees in these countries.”

Fair play to you Twitter; that makes good business sense – Until you encounter European greed that is. If they could do it in USA, Canada, and India; then why not in Europe and the UK? Do those 3 places have more money than Europe and the UK? USA probably does; Canada I don’t know, India probably not: So it’s probably not a case of Europe being too poor to afford it. What it boils down to is greed; especially in the case of the UK:

For years the mobile communications industry has been milking the market and making vast fortunes at the expense of customers in the UK : This has been rip-off Britain at it’s worst; and although it’s slightly better lately; it’s still happening: There is so much money in the UK mobile communications industry that they wouldn’t even notice it if they gave Twitter free calls forever.

“We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more
mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we’ve arrived
at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs
and take a different approach. Since you probably don’t live in
Canada, India, or the US, we recommend receiving your Twitter
updates via one of the following methods.”

“m.twitter.com works on browser-enabled phones
m.slandr.net works on browser-enabled phones
TwitterMail.com works on email-enabled phones
Cellity [http://bit.ly/12bw4R] works on java-enabled phones
TwitterBerry [http://bit.ly/MFAfJ] works on BlackBerry phones
Twitterific [http://bit.ly/1WxjwQ] works on iPhones”

Thanks to the greedy money-grabbing European telecoms giants such as BT in particular no doubt; Twitter gets squeezed out. If the USA, Canada, and India can have free tweets sent to their phones then so can the Brits etc: This sounds like a case for OFCOM.