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SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble
paradoxSpirit writes "Physorg has a paper comparing the cost of text messaging versus the cost of getting data from Hubble Space Telescope. From the article: 'The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 [$732.95] per MB — or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs." "Hubble is by no means a cheap mission — but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!""
"160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system,..."
WTF?
Also, they don't seem to account for any headers or other transmission overhead? Where'd these guys come from, the Verizon School of Mathematics?
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
I've often believed (known?) that text messaging is just a last refuge of the cell phone companies to squeeze a little extra money out of their consumers. As it is, on my carrier, I get unlimited calling to people on the same carrier all day, every day. I get unlimited calling to anybody, regardless of carrier, on nights and weekends. I even pay to have unlimited data transfer. But if I send more than number of text messages a month, it adds up substantially.
Good thing they've got all those teenagers hooked on it.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
and they have these stupid contracts such as "You pay as 15 pounds a month and we'll give you x many text messages free!"
What a stupid offer.. I mean what's next. I pay Microsoft 250 pounds and they give me a free operating system? Who are the kidding here?
When in Thailand I had the best phone contract ever with DTAC, 8 pounds a month, free phone calls any time for as long as I wanted to 5 selected numbers including 500 hours internet usage.
To ask for such a price in the places such as England would get you laughed out the shop.
nilbog writes
"What's the actual cost of sending SMS messages? This article does the math and concludes that, for example, sending an amount of data that would cost $1 from your ISP would cost over $61 million if you were to send it over SMS. Why has the cost of bandwidth, infrastructure, and technology in general plummeted while the price of SMS messages have risen so egregiously? How can carriers continue to justify the high cost of their apparent super-premium data transmission?"
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/29/0244208&from=rss
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Okay, let's see your calculations.
because the whole idea that cell towers and the like just sprouted like weeds is appealing but they are costly.
Actually the comparison is bogus because its apple's and oranges. They have nothing in common other than that word "transmit"
How much did it cost to deploy and manage a network capable of servicing text messages?
How much did it cost to deploy the Hubble, let alone a system to manage it?
Both relied on much existing infrastructure but I have to wonder, whats the preoccupation with texting? I know people who can't take a second breath in between having to text others. Are we that boring we need to bombard everyone around us to prove we are alive?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Is that the real cost of sending a text msg or just the average rate charged per msg? One has got to think its cheaper for phone companies to send a text msg then it is to make a phone call, but I don't know.
No Wonder ET wants to call home
Everyone knows cellular companies markup text services so high it's ridiculous. I think it's in the range of 4000x higher than data transfer rates. You pay 0.10 for 140bytes for texts, or about 0.15 for 1024bytes in any data transfer service.
This just makes it a stellar ripoff. When will it ever change?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent.
Sprint's charging $0.20 each for these now-a-day (unless you have another plan of some sort). It's just the latest ripoff in the mobile phone industry.
How much does it cost the carrier to transmit the data? Is texting ultimately more expensive than calling?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
If you look into the dim and distant past SMS was a free service that came with your phone 'package'. Then they realised they could actually make money from it.
Ironically the price of an SMS is dropping and it actually costs somebody who 'bulk' buys 10000 messages around about 1.5p .
My concern is that it is getting so cheap, that I've already started receiving spam SMS.
As an aside, some companies now provide a SIM card hosting service. So if you can get the right package from an Operator (e.g. unlimited SMS messages) there is nothing to stop you spamming the world.
Thankfully 'clicking' on any links is not so simple and most people realise clicking actually costs them money.
Does that mean they used Hubble to find the costs?
This
In the Netherlands 0.25 euro (16p or $0.38) per message is quite common. For that price I can call 1.67 minutes.
But that doesn't matter for me. I don't use text messages for the simple reason that I don't think it's worth the price.
Has anyone looked into "Unlimited Texting" recently? With Cingular/AT&T: Unlimited text, photo, video, and instant messaging for everyone on a family plan: $30. Maximum number of people on a family plan: 5.
30/5 = $6 for unlimited texting.
Ok, that doesn't include the cost of the voice part of the plan that you obviously need to have.
I don't know the maximum size of a MMS, but it's under a MB, around 700k I think. That'll move data around pretty quick-like, too.
Next...
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
I saw this reported on a TV show a couple weeks ago amid much outcry... but just as with pretty much everything else, the price of an SMS is set acording to supply and demand. If enough people are willing to pay 5p per message, then that's what the carriers are going to charge!
This has been a pretty well know fact in the tech community. the mobile carriers have been overcharging everybody. almost 7 to 10 years back India had one of the most expensive mobile communication, but for the last 2 years it has been one of the cheapest areas, while this process of cost cutting was under way a rally was called for networks providing free SMSs always. The SMS text is sent in just the connectivity with the carrier tower connectivity signaling. No special protocol has to be envoked nor any special services to be provided. So the burden on the network is less than nominal.
So when you factor in these novelty SMS messages, the ratio becomes much worse.
I have never seen any hard data on the actual costs of sending a SMS message across GSM/CDMA cell towers, but I expect that the profit margins on a SMS message make Monster look positively razor thin with it's own margins.
The reason why anyone with a brain (even a damaged/inebriated/mutated one) can see how ridiculous the price points on SMS is pretty simple.
Take a mid-range T-Mobile calling plan. Say the individual 1000 minutes for 49.99$. That is 4.9c per MINUTE of a telephone conversation.
Until quite recently, a SMS text message plan did not have unlimited messages. They do have this now for 14.99$ at T-Mobile. The plan right below that? 9.99$ a month for 1000 messages. Yep, that is 1c per text message. I had always remembered plans that were 250 messages for 4.99$ at various places, which is 1.9c per text message.
So does anyone really beleive that a SMS text message can cost 20-25% as much as a minute of a cellphone call?
I certainly didn't think so. Raise your hands if you think that is right. Anyone? Anyone at all?
SMS was ALWAYS their little cash machine. Most people never paid attention to it, or considered the real costs involved and I would bet 4-5 digit profit margins at a minimum for the past decade.
So... get an unlimited plan? Oh wait, they charge you extra for the privilege of never using your voice minutes to cover the cost of the text messaging, which itself is entirely negligible. Negligible on the scale of non-spam email vs total Internet bandwidth negligible. This gouging is just so painful to observe.
For the record, I hate text messages except for those occasional times when they make sense (finding someone at a loud concert, e.g.). Paying an outrageous rate both inbound and outbound for 140 bytes is entirely ridiculous.
Yeargh! End of rant.
-l
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Actually, the standard rate for text messaging in the UK is 10p, not 5p
Ink for your printer is more expensive than gasoline for your car. Where's the justice?
So is this really newsworthy, unless new information is brought to light, like the actual cost of text messaging or the antequated data networks being used to transmit this information, which account for the exponentially high costs?
To reiterate, this is obvious when you think about it: there is no profit motive to sending data to and from the hubble space telescope. The rates he's giving are the price of text messages--market value--, not the cost of transmission.
Here's a question for a better comparison: how much would it cost to buy a photograph directly from the hubble telescope?
From what I've heard, the opposite is true in Japan: their voice plans are expensive compared to ours, whereas unlimited text messages are the norm. This makes more sense because voice is clearly the more bandwidth hungry form of communication.
I'm told that the driving factor behind this unlimited texting is that it is considered very rude to talk on your phone in public/the subway/etc. Hence texting as the dominant type of communication. Can anyone confirm/correct me on this?
...and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p... for the average consumer maybe... but you're a crackhead if you think it actually costs a telcom 5 p to deliver 140 bytes at their leisure.You're comparing cost versus retail price of two things massively different in scale in terms (cost per MB) that is completely meaningless in the world of SMS. Could you possibly have made a more pointless comparison?
/.
My computing time is 4x more valuable analyzing Seti@home data as opposed to loading this article up on
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
Japanese cell phone plans are universally calculated by amount of data transmitted and not minutes/# of text messages. It is actually significantly more economical to text message someone on a Japanese cell phone network than it is to call them, as the calls eat up your data allotment very quickly. As a result you will very rarely see people talking on cell phones over there, instead they just text. Of course, as a result they can type of text messages at an astonishing rate.
Bit of a troll, here, methinks.
That isn't to say that they're still many many many times more expensive than the cost of an SMS to the operator. But that's market forces for you. People pay that much, therefore it's "worth" that much.
Get your own free personal location tracker
As long as we like your data usage ?
Is this really a valid comparison? I mean, yes, Hubble is up in space and talks to earth, and that's complicated. But, Hubble is only one target, talking to relatively small handful of earth based stations. On the other hand, a cell phone network consists of traffic management for millions of subscribers, and with thousands of ground based stations that must be maintained.
This is my sig.
I've disabled text messaging because of the terrible value it presents. I have way more voice minutes than I know what to do with for $60/mo. Why would I pay $0.20 for a tiny little text message? I can just make a phone call.
Printer ink versus a gallon of gas?
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
It's just those boffins at Hubble grumbling. Think about it, do you really think you'll get smileys and flirty leetspeak messages via Hubble? No. And that is why Hubble is so effing cheap.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Although it's not quite the same thing. Here in Ireland at least, O2 gives you 250 free texts per month to use via their website - perfect for a geek like me stuck in a chair all day at work and at home. Because of this and my total lack of desire to call people, in six years I've spent less than 200 euros in total including the cost of the phone itself.
Are comparable services available in the USA?
Would you have actually complained about 5p for a text message before this was shown? Pricing a text message at 5p makes sense, as it's small enough to seem negligible,and presumably enough that [your operator] can make a profit. Furthermore, Hubble is presumably downloading lots and lots of megabytes of data, whereas a text is 140 bytes a go. As we've seen with most forms of data storage/transmission, price and size do not scale linearly - just as a 200GB hard disk does not cost twice as much as a 100GB one, a 1.4 kilobyte email does not cost 10 times as much as 10 140 byte texts. It would be interesting to see how a mobile operator breaks down text pricing, and see how much goes on carrying the data
Isn't text messaging at least 6x more valuable than Hubble data?
And liquid Nitrogen is cheaper to buy than beer. I know what I'll be having with my next meal now...
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
I'm not sure what the point here is. It's sort of like those posters that used hang in Sherwin Williams stores informing us that paint is actually cheap when compared to the cost of an equal amount of nail polish.
Proverbs 21:19
It costs at max Re.1/- which is ~1.25p. Some networks its half the cost. However I am not counting the cost of the SMS that one sends to the plethora of reality shows. There the costs might go 4x to 6x. And if it is for downloading ringtones, it could go upto 15x!
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
I text almost consistently throughout the day sending a total of about 10000 SMS/MMS a month. The plan I have through AT&T allows for unlimited text for our entire family of 6 lines. So that means we pay $5.00/person. That makes my cost per text about $0.0005 a message per person. I get all of my email sent to my phone as a MMS as well and some of those can be around 100KB as well.
So in my case, I believe it's rather handy and cost effective means of data transfer since data packages are so damn expensive.
P2P (person to person) messages sent in-network (att customer to att customer, etc) are very inexpensive for the network operator. The SMS system is a facility built in to the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the Switching System 7 (SS7) used by most US, Euro and Asian nations. Operators just get SMS basically for free as part of any standard implementation of the SS7 protocol.
However, as soon as the user sends a message to a mobile subscriber out of their network, they have to go through a gateway. The gateway operators are the ones making all the money. Since each gateway only has relationships with a limited number of carriers, the gateways have to have relationships with each other (and pay accordingly). There are very few inter. op. gateways in the world, so they've been able to charge an arm and a leg and the operators are over a barrel.
There are some competitors in this space, and the price is going down as carriers try to lower costs. As the gateways become more numerous, they will make less money. Don't worry, the carriers won't pass that cost savings on to the customer. They think it's their turn to get rich.
I pay $3 a month here in Canada for 100 text messages a month, additional text messages are $0.15. I have a 140 character limit, which is more than enough for the typical "cant talk sup" message. Furthermore, at least here you can send text messages from the internet to cellphones for free, but if the recipient as a prepaid phone they get charged $0.15 per message received.
I'm not sure how the message leaves the tubes and reaches the cellphone, but I think it has something to do with wifi.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
to make the Hubble look relatively inexpensive. Space research is expensive and no "apples to asteroids (~TM)" comparisons will change that. Compare the annual cost of supporting Hubble to the annual expenditures on dog food in the US and it will look like a tremendous bargain.
Space exploration will never garner adequate support because it's cheaper than the sum of all SMS plans. It will gain support by demonstrating its value: both scientific and in public relations. IMHO, Hubble.org has done more to advance the cause of space than any asinine comparison, such as this.
Invenio via vel creo
You should go over your itemized phone bill sometime. It turns out the cell phone company is compelled to collect USD $6-7 from each customer in the form of federal, state, and local taxes. That ends up being 20% of my phone bill. The gov't is taxing our right to "free" speech (beyond vocal distance). Who's going to protect the consumers from the gov't?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I'm not sure I understand the author's point. In the real world, things are worth pretty much whatever people are willing to pay for them. The cost of the infrastructure only determines the lowest profitable price. Yep, SMS can be expensive. Don't like that? Ok, find another provider who offers it cheaper, use another alternative technology instead, or get by without it.
SMS has value to people because it's useful to them, so the mobile companies charge what the market will bear. People get a service at a price that they find acceptable (they must, because they're buying lots of it) and the phone company makes a profit for their shareholders. Everyone wins.
Ringtones cost more than music.
Capitalism at it's best. Allowing idiots to subsidize the rest of us since 1776.
I think that they should charge $5 per text message. Then maybe kids would have to choose between texting and drugs.
let the cell companies run NASA.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Was the authour just guessing? Last I looked, SMS'es were UTF-8. That means anything from 1 to 4 bytes per character. (that's bytes, 8-bit entities)
Comparing the retail price of a text message with the cost of downloading data from the the Hubble, is a bit like comparing the cost of running a municipal water system with the retail price of a bottle of imported mineral water.
It can be done, but it is kind of pointless.
A better comparison might be between a ground based content generator and the Hubble or between a text message and a post card.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
As far as I know the cost of SMS hasn't risen. It jus hasn't fallen.
When SMS started (early 90's - anyone?) the cost was, IIRC, 10p each. Now it's 5p. The starting price was a guess and seems to have more-or-less stuck. Obviously if people weren't willing to use the service the price would've been reduced. Since people are willing to pay 5p per message, there's no reason (how do you spell CARTEL, by the way?) for any of the carriers to reduce it.
What they have done instead is to bundle "free" texts in with your monthly contracts - which is nice for the pay-monthly grown-ups, who don't use them, but no use at all for the PAYG kiddies who are the main text users.
Now that's marketing!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
There are outfits like Pocket or Cricket that offer unlimited service, with no contracts. The downside? If you are a regular traveler the roaming will cost. But for 99% of us who are townies this is great. There are other similar companies.
Want to stay with a major carrier? Then try Sprint's SERO plan. Has text, data and roaming are unlimited. Starts at $30 a month.
Here in Ireland where we have, as i understand, the highest mobile phone texting outside of japan, we have found ways around it.
You download a java applet for your phone that sends your texts messages using the online "freetext" system of your operator using a gprs connection.
So your text works out at about 2-3c even with the massive overhead of setting up http connections and everything.
Cost is x2+ more as you pay for incoming as well and us rates at $0.15 - $0.20 per message or more each way.
I got into twitter recently (once the jQuery team began twittering) and my co-worker (who had been into twitter before) told me that I should have it send the messages to my cell phone. Unfortunately, the plan I'm on (with Verizon Wireless) charges $0.20 per text message sent or received. So, using Dr Banniste's calculations, I would need to pay 20 cents for each of 7,490 text messages. Transmitting 1MB of data would cost me $1,498, or 9 times the cost of transmitting 1MB of Hubble data. I could pay Verizon $5 per month per phone to get unlimited texting, but that would mean increasing my bill by $10 per month (for 2 phones), or $120 per year. I just don't see the need to pay Verizon so much more money just to get and send text messages.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
http://www.qwitt.com/2008/04/22/another-strip-about-apple/
I see several grammatical errors and a fragmentary sentence with no verb, and that's only on the first sentence of your report. I'm afraid, I'll have to mark this paper with a D, since I really don't like to give Fs.
Fortunately, for me, I don't have to worry about the high cost of text messaging, since I don't happen to have a teenage daughter. With any luck, by the time my youngest is old enough to have a phone, SMS will be cheaper, or at least controllable from a parent configuration option in the phone plans. A sane plan would be something like: you can send 500 text messages or talk as long as you like, once you exceed your message limit your phone deactivates SMS. Of course there is always the really mean parent option: use up your SMS and the whole phone shuts down, except for parent GPS tracking. We like to call this plan the Windows Stepmother Plan (WSP). Did I say Windows? I meant Wicked.
Now calculate this with the Cost of text in India.
Cost of one Regular SMS=50p(INR 0.50)
So 7490 text messages cost 7490 x INR 0.50 = INR 3745.00
At the present rate as on XE.com, that will be 89.1030 USD or 45.4727 GBP. That is Eight Times Cheaper.
Can anyone tell me why First World Countries charge so much for this when Third World Countries can actually afford it for so less?
Forgive me for the obvious, but why would you compare SMS to normal data bandwidth? I would attach the file from the SD memory card on my smart phone to a standard email message and use a small portion of my flat rate unlimited bandwidth rather than sending an image or a chunk of data.
What is the cost of sending 1GB of data from the Hubble vs. sending 1GB of data via a flat rate, unlimited transfer hand held data connection? That would be a far more intelligent comparison.
BTW, for the same flat rate I also get unlimited text messages, too, so it is still a moot point. My flat rate per month is less than the numbers estimated for the single example given.
This just screams "flame bait" to me.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
modern consumers are like cattle obediently marching to slaughter... the concept of voting with your dollar is simple enough for a child to understand and yet the american public allows.. nay they *demand* fat corporations to shit all over them.
It's how organizations like the RIAA and MPAA run amok in a country where if 10% of the 'infringers' got off their ass long enough to organize and/or vote you could enact a law that would mandate that their lawyers walk around town with a bucket of weasel crap on their head while brittney spears is piped directly to their cerebral cortex.
Email is standardised, more reliable, easier to manage and a whole lot more versatile. Anyone who uses SMS to communicate regularly is nuts. I no longer use it, nor a Blackberry which is also an expensive way to communicate - it's only value prop being it's push. The best way is to configure your email client on each device you own and use that. If it's urgent, pickup the phone and take advantage of all those free mimutes! Talk is cheap, really!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
I have 4 people on my family package, giving me 56.6 hours of talk time per day. It would take 2.361~ people talking 24/hours a day to use up all of my minutes, yet it costs me .20c to send a txt msg. Atleast they're free incoming. We also get free in-family calls. Ma'b I should get a 3-way conference going on my in-family and let the phones sit on all month and see if they let me choose to stop doing that for free txt...??
Much more data is sent with an SMS that just the text of the message. How do you think you get the caller id of who sent the message? To see how much data is actually sent check out the format of a "call detail record". Most data is not compressed, but rather sent as a comma separated list. You would be amazed at how much data is actually tranfered for any type of wireless communication. First the message from the sending device is sent to the nearest cell tower, which contacts a database to see which carrier you subscribe to. (Your phone does this periodically also, so your carrier knows which cell tower service area you are in so they know where to send your calls). The number you are calling is looked up in a database so they know which cell tower to broadcast your message from. Plus your IMEI,ESN, calling number, called number,originating and terminating cell tower information, originating and terminating switch and trunk data are transmitted with each message. Copies of each record are reformatted and sent to the carrier for retention, copies are sent to the billing company and the company that maintains the carrier's customer service web site, etc.
My point is that much more data gets transferred for each sms than the 160 characters of the text. Considering all the data transfers required for the whole process, the text of the message is actually a very low percentage total data processed.
It does NOT seem fair enough. What if you don't want the call (and they block caller id), you get charged anyway and it's your problem. It doesn't even carry over to land lines, where you receive a long distance call for free and don't have to pay long distance even though you're talking to someone who called you over a long distance and are using those carriers and lines. It's just an excuse. An excuse to charge you more, and you're lapping it up like candy.
Any comparison of cost of large file transfers via SMS are apple and orange, i.e. not valid comparisons. It is like measuring the capacity of an 8-inch floppy to a 1GB flash drive.
Get over it.
JOAT(MON) Computer Psychiatrist
The (monetary) efficiency of the final payload is exactly what interests the author. That so much more data is used to send a paltry 160 characters is part of thew reason SMS fairs so poorly from a cost standpoint.
Whether it's avoidable considering Hubble always sends the data to the same few places vs. the needed routing for millions of cell phones to send to millions of other cell phones is a fair question, though.
One way the cost per byte of final payload can be lowered is to allow more bytes of payload per message so the percentage of transmitted data that is overhead shrinks. However, in the case of SMS, we get into the cost factor for the hardware, battery, radio, and software in the handsets to try to change that ratio.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"What u doin?"
"Nothin U?"
"Nothin bored"
"Me too"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I pay $10 dollars a month for unlimited free text and mms messages...What's this 20c shit?
It's atheism. It's an 'ism'.
A - not
theism - belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically : belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of the human race and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world (copied from Merriam Websters).
Not collecting stamps would be aphilately. Well, maybe not.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Are we talking about marginal cost or average cost? Is it about who pays or who benefits? You might as well compare the cost of Hubble data to pancakes unless you are considering life cycle costs and benefits. The average value of a text message is zero in most cases, and cell phone providers should be grateful that they can con customers into paying more to save their bandwidth.
While it's not a true "free market" in telecomm in the US, it is a quadopoly. (Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and Tmo). And unlike Comcast vs Satellite where differences in the technology make significant difference to the subscribers, with phones the differences are small and in many cases more obscure than subscribers would care to understand (Edge vs. WCDMA, etc.). So if one network could just offer its subs "unlimited text free with every plan" they would have done so already, and "owned" the cheapskate segment (a large portion of the subscribers) for quite a while until their competitors did the same.
And while there may still be some bandwidth available on the SS7 links at my favorite wireless carrier, all the call processing information traverses these links too, and there are significant real-time constraints on this data. If you congest those links, calls fail, people retry, calls attempts per hour skyrocket, people try to get through with SMS... it just snowballs.
The other factor to consider is when people are being billed "per item" they want an itemized list. So if you can fit 140 rows on a page and print double sided, then every 280 messages costs you a page of billing, it costs you that much database space in your computers which have to be able to pull up more than 160 characters worth of data on each meangingless little text message for 90 days into the past in case you dispute that particular text message.
When you combine the billing costs and the needed over-purchase (for peak hour loads) of the SS7 links, sms's have some significant costs attached. One of the reasons they can go $20 a month for unlimited texting (when this would only cover 400 messages at 5 cents each) is due to decreased cost of "detail billing" that goes away with the unlimited plans.
So, in summary, it's complicated, but if they could lower their prices they would, not out of kindness, but because of the murderous advantage it would give them in the marketplace.
There are some contracts out there that on the surface appear to be reasonable deals. The contract that I have costs 15.50 (GBP)/month. This covers me for 200 text messages and 200 minutes of air time.
So,
echo '1550/200' | bc -l
7.75
per text. Not so great is it.
However, I also pay 7.50 (GBP) for unlimited data on EGPRS/HSDPA. Sadly though my mobile cannot do HSDPA, so it's still rather limited and the cost of improving the modem would be too much for me.
Why UNIX?
Sometimes, people that make up 'The Market' have absolutely no clue what the real value of a thing is. When someone educates them, then maybe they will demand that the product or service be re-priced to a more reasonable value.
Some people, in this discussion, have pointed out that comparing downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope vs. SMS is an apples to oranges comparison. That's true, which is why it's even *more* outrageous what the phone companies charge. Let me explain: the Hubble Space Telescope is a very specialty communication. You do not have good infrastructure 'economies of scale'. I absolutely guarantee that the *real* infrastructure cost for Hubble is far more than it is for text messaging - particularly when you consider that the digital phone networks had to be built to support telephone conversations, and any additional services like SMS are, essentially, free to the phone companies. There is, basically, no additional cost incurred on them to support SMS.
One would expect, in that situation, in a functioning market, that the cost to consumers for SMS would be very close to 0, as the real cost on top of what they are already paying for their phone service (which nominally goes to maintaining the phone networks and providing the phone company with a profit) is very close to 0.
So the point of the article is to contrast the very *real* cost of the Hubble Space Telescope, vs. the artificial cost of SMS, and to thereby educate consumers that they are getting ripped off.
Of course, as most people here point out, anyone with a rudimentary understanding of digital technology (which, honestly, probably isn't anywhere close to a majority of the population) should already have figured out a long time ago that this is a ripoff, and just avoid using those services.
Personally, I almost never use Text messaging on my phone; for one thing, it's a total pain in the arse to type messages in on a numpad (I don't have a 'full' keypad like a Blackberry or similar device), and the main reason is, I refuse to pay $5-$10/mo for 'unlimited texting', or 15c per message. Even the 'flat rates' are, honestly, pretty much a ripoff.
I have to chuckle every time I see the ads, recently, for the new ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS PER MONTH unlimited plans the mobile companies are rolling out. That's just crazy expensive.
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There's all this talk of how much SMS messages cost per byte and how that relates to the bandwidth available on the network and so on yet no one has mentioned one of the best comments from the last time this topic was brought up here on Slashdot: The Marginal Cost of SMS is 0
Read that comment! Basically it says that it costs the telco nothing in terms of bandwidth (or anything else, really) to send your messages back and forth.
That comment was referenced in this blog post. I was so outraged after reading it that I called up AT&T and told them to make it so that I can't send or receive text messages anymore. As a side-effect, I can no longer tell when I have voice messages, but it's totally worth it.
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I can't believe nobody recognizes this for what it is. Simple collusion is what's preventing the market from ironing out this massive discrepancy in profitability. In a functioning market, competitors would arise and prices would go down. The fact that they're not means they're all cooperating with each other to keep prices high. Simple, and criminal, but that's all it is.
I understand that SMS is expensive in the U.S. because it's what people are willing to pay. Fine. What I don't understand is why the cell carriers aren't competing on that feature. For the past decade, the number of features, number of minutes, etc. have all been steadily climbing, while calling plan prices have remained more or less steady. And yet, for some reason, there isn't a cell carrier in the country who charges less than 15 cents for an SMS. Why aren't they competing on this feature? Why isn't there a single carrier who said, "You know, we could charge 5 cents a message, and still make an enormous profit on SMS messages, and grab a bunch of our competitors' business!"? What am I missing here? Are they call colluding on SMS, but not on other features?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
In fact here in Portugal most young people use SMS a lot because most of them have free SMS and of course no one pays for receiving SMS. And there's a lot of advantages in places where you can't talk for example.. but to pay just for receiving is absurd lol. I can't understand how can they do such thing in the US where things are usually much cheaper than in Europe...
All that tells me is that it costs more to BILL for the SMS text message then to SEND it. Maybe they should just stop charging for it if you pay monthly for a cell phone.
Here in NZ, texting is used a lot and the phone companies do really good deals that work out at 1c per text or so.
The article is a crock too. If you buy text messages in bulk they cost almost nothing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In-flight calls or data are a poor example. You're talking about putting in equipment that costs more than typical network equipment because of requirements like low EMI, light weight, minimal maintenance, ground stations to handle the data, programming to manage handoffs at 500+ mph, and the process of getting FAA approval when you integrate it with a jillion other systems on a commercial airliner. It genuinely is expensive. Even at $10/hour that Boeing was charging for their Connexion internet service, they lost huge amounts of money on it (I think partially because they over-engineered the system, but I'm not very familiar with the details).
The cost of using it are very low, but the costs to initially add the feature are very high. Then you add in the fact that usage rates are typically low (only a handful of passengers buy it, only "full-service" airlines install the equipment), it can be hard to make it pay for itself.
Of course, they do add a high margin on top of their projected costs because they can without affecting the demand much, but the fixed costs still dominate (at the moment...data services will be much better integrated in the coming generation of airliners, and we may be moving towards allowing cell phones in flight, too).
SMS is the opposite. They aren't seeing low usage on new, expensive infrastructure. They're seeing high usage on existing, paid-for infrastructure.
The SMS scheme really isn't a very good one. SMS messages get multiplexed into the control channels on the mobile phone network, and it's really a 2nd generation technology. The size of the control channels is fundamentally limited, but each slot is big enough for a text message. So the providers squeeze the SMS into it because it fits and it doesn't require re-engineering their protocols to fit it in the voice channels. This is also why SMS is limited to so few characters: That's what fits in a time-division on the control channel.
Unfortunately, it proved to be a popular service. The limited extra space fills up quickly. In fact, it's theoretically possible to launch a relatively wide-area DDoS attack by sending only a couple hundred messages per second from zombie clients. To get the best return on their existing capacity, providers raise the price to discourage excessive use.
The puzzling thing in my opinion is that it's taking so long for this service to shift from being side-banded in the 2G scheme to being normal data packets on 3G networks. As that happens, the capacity for text explodes (text is way more compact than voice, pictures, video and other planned 3G content) and the providers can leverage the genuinely low cost of text to undersell their competitor's plans. A pricewar ensues and the consumers win.
But it hasn't happened yet. My best guess is because the companies realize that the first one to make a substantial move in this direction will only enjoy success for a short time before the others all catch up. Then the competitive advantage is gone and profits have dropped close to zero.
No, I haven't sourced much of this. It's mostly conclusions from discussions with friends who work in the mobile industry. Feel free to correct the parts I got wrong.
It is like calculating how much toilet paper would cost if I flew each roll from Asia to Central America, one by one using first class.
I mean a nerdy argument, but does not really lead anywhere.
That's a pretty bad analysis. They're really comparing apples with oranges. I'm sure the cost of sending a text message is much lower that a nickel, which is its selling price. In fact the incremental cost of one text message is probably non-significant.
But they are not comparing this cost to the cost of Hubble data transmission, they are using the price instead. Now I'm sure if there was a market for the Hubble data (is there?) they would sell for more than its cost, as is the case with any other good out there.
Somebody is loopy! SMS may be charged a lot for and well these charges are high but the cost of SMS is exactly a grand total of NOTHING.
I know you are probably asking how and that is quite simple. Your cell phone transmits a 256 byte message very regularly to the receiving tower and it transmits a corresponding message back to you regularly. This is how your cell phone connects to the network and how they know you are able to receive calls etc. This message has 186 bytes of blank space in it .... unless .... you put an SMS message out or they transmit one to you. SMS rides in this carrier byte packet. As such it costs the network exactly nothing and uses no bandwidth that isn't already in use even if nobody ever sent an SMS message.
So this gets really nice for the company. They bill astronomically for a "Free Good" and we stupidly allow them to bill us for this. SMS should be 100% free with cell phone service. Even the message handling costs are insignificant world wide for this and nobody should ever be billed for it. Of course we stupidly allow them to sell it and we of course buy it stupidly.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Have you thought of why that 256 byte message gets sent so regularly? Just a wild guess, but could it be your phone checking to see if there are any new SMS messages?
I wonder what the charge/MB of SMS would be if all these tiny, almost empty communications were counted.
Ever since Space: 1999 showed communicators with little TV screens in them, that's the what communication should look like. Hell, even Star Trek didn't have that. Then again, they could talk from orbit to deep inside... the... center... of... a... dead... planet... buried alive... buried alive. *Shakes uncontrollably* KAHNNNN!!!!!!!! But the damn cellphone companies take us backward a hundred years to something that's one step removed from Morse code. Hell, even the FCC figured out that hams don't need it anymore. GAH!!!!
I've got a Blackberry w/Verizon for work with an unlimited data plan. I can send and receive all the emails I want via my Inbox (tied to my corporate Exchange), or via Gmail, or even via ssh to my shell account with Alpine. They still charge to send and receive (SMS?) text messages. How lame is that? I can use my tethered modem and get a VPN started and use my Cisco IP Communicator, no extra charge, but no text messaging for free!
My Wife has Cricket, which has unlimited calling and unlimited texting - but doesn't allow her to send emails. Well, it says she can't, and complains each time she does ("Cricket does not support this activity at this time"), but usually it goes through. I think there is a work-around by sending an MMS (?) message and that allowed emailing, but still complains.
It's all lame. If we're paying for what accounts for unlimited data, just give us unlimited data.
So you are referring to the data overhead. What is about Hubble? I am pretty sure to send 1MB or raw data it actually transfers much more than that, redundancy checks, etc...
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
I will try and provide a somewhat serious answer.
There are a number of expensive hardware and software components that are involved in the SMS flow. If I want to send an SMS from my cell phone to another cell phone at a different carrier, these are some of the costs that come into play. The phone connects to the base station and submits the message to the MSC (mobile switching center) where it travels over SS7 to the SMSC (short message service center). The SS7 network which is the telecommunications signalling network is significantly less efficient than IP and significantly more expensive to operate than an IP network. For example I can walk into a store and buy an ethernet NIC for $15 but SS7 cards which are significantly slower cost at least $10,000 each, primarily due to more complicated signaling that happens on the board and the fact that these are low production run items, not commodity hardware. The SMSC will pass the message to an SMS router which will figure out that the message is not for the local network and pass the message to an intercarrier gateway to be sent to the remote network and the process is reversed. SMS router to SMSC to MSC (after an HLR lookup) to the base station and to the remote handset. The MSCs, SMSCs and SMS Routers are expensive, not just hardware, because they run specialized software. The intercarrier service will also collect some money, maybe 1 cent per message for a domestic message. In addition to the message path, you need billing records at several points in the message lifetime, both for billing purposes and to store for later access by customer service in case someone asks WTF happend to their message. SMSCs are also store and forward engines (think about the case where the phone is off, or out of range) so they need to have large databases. Deploying the infrastructure for SMS services at carriers costs millions to tens of millions of dollars, plus operational and customer support costs. This is not cheap. I have hope that the deployment of SIGTRAN (SS7 over IP) in the carrier networks should drop the cost of an SMS message by a little bit but these are being rolled out slowly. Another possibility would be IMS/SIP based networks might be able to use SIP messages to more cheaply transmit messages but it will take some time before we see anything like that. Intercarrier costs are not likely to be decreasing anytime soon, unless something dramatic happens like ENUM gets merged into standard global DNS networks, which I am not sure would be possible due to privacy concerns.
SMS are sent over the SS7 network. The size of the message text is pretty much linked to the allowed size of the packets on the lower level protocols. SMS bearer data (message text and meta-data about the message such as priority etc.) travels over IS-41 MAP or GSM MAP which is on top of TCAP (similar to TCP for SS7) which is on top of SCCP (similar to IP) and MTP3. The maximum size of an MTP3 message is 272 bytes. Each of the higher-level protocol have slightly less size allowed. SCCP has 250 bytes to play with and so on, until you get to the standard 140 8-bit / 160 7-bit characters in the SMS. There is a technique called SCCP XUDT (extended user data) which allows you to segment messages, but it isn't supported by older network elements in most carrier networks. So the size of the SMS is stuck. But I don't mind, it has spawned a world of abbreviations that would not have otherwise existed.
No the SMS messages are not free. The mobile network infrastructure cost billions and billions to build, and yearly maintenance costs are probably in the billions in the USA alone.
If you ignore these costs, then also the phone calls and the data connections cost nothing... And yet they charge us for that too! Outrageous!
It is actually even worse.
There is no extra infrastructure to be placed for SMS - even the billing is built into the mobile switch.
An SMS may take three days.
There is no guarantee that an SMS is actually delivered.
So people saved from distress at see by SMS really should go again and offer their god a second and third time.
There is no data to move around. It is all in the control channel.
Your mobile exchanges status messages with the various bits of the mobile infrastructure anyway. This is also an opportunity to add an SMS.
There is no Content Industry to charge most and make your life miserable, anyway.
SMS is the optimum product for a Telco. The ROI can not and will probably never ever be matched in any telco product anyway.
I really don't know about what is going on in the USA, regarding these "costs", but I used to work for LogicaCMG (who at one point was responsible for the production of 75% of all the SMS servers in the world). I have also maintained software for routing SMS throughout the world.
Let me tell you, the actual costs of sending SMS is peanuts. In 2001 it was approximately 0.1p per message. Its actually much cheaper now. This includes cost of electricity, processor power, and all other associated costs.
A poster below explains how SMS worked previously, that it effectively uses part of the "wasted" sideband in the GSM signalling. This sideband always exists, and if the payload was not used, it is effectively wasted.
Whilst it is true that although "free" there is a finite limit on the total number of sidebands available for SMS, again technology has come up with a different answer. Most modern GSM phones (Especially Sony Ericsson, and I am certain the others have menu options too) have the ability to send SMS via GPRS as opposed to GSM sideband. GPRS has a far higher bandwidth, and on 3G/HSPDA it can go up to 3.5Mbit per second. This "data rate" is already offered to most people at FAR less costs than SMS.
The point being is that SMS is extremely cheap for the operators. So why the insane costs? Lets take one2one-uk (now t-mobile-uk). When they started their SMS service in 1997/1998, they charged 4p per message, and made a tidy profit at the time. Very soon afterwards, they ramped their costs to 10p per message. They said they did this to match what vodafone, etc was doing. It appeared that their surveys shown that customers were willing to pay 10p per message!?!
This was around about the time the 3G auctions happend, and the operators in Europe blew huge amounts of money bidding for the frequencies, hoping the dot com boom will bring immense profits (ie they were greedy)
What actually happened was, that the dot com era flopped, and the services they were looking to profit from the 3G era simply vanished. Laden with debt, they have used SMS to provide their method of debt recovery.
Its just pure profit. It particularly shows when they also charge 10p per message when sent through their web interface. grrrrrrrrrr.
What's even more galling is that that T-Mobile charge 20p per message to send abroad, and when abroad they charge 40p per message (rip off).
Now when you consider T-Mobile charges 20p per message for MMS (which can contain MUCH more text, and Pictures, AND sound - and should cost more to send). and its 20p irregardless of whether you send from within the UK, or abroad, and to any number in the world. So it PROOVES that the operators CAN reduce costs.
Finally the same phones sending or receiving SMS and MMS, can also send Email at potentially more cost benefits, and you can see how crazy the whole situation is.
I can "partly" understand BT charging 10p per text message send via the "landline" here in the UK (yes we have SMS send and receive through landlines as well, with a suitable phone). But its a bit more involved through a landline, as it involves a "hidden" data call both ways to send/receive.
So there you go.
Have a nice day!
Here in Germany, when cellphones first hit the streets, they were quite expensive. SMS messages between phones, however, were free - a kind of add-on, to see how people like them.
Apparently the LOVE them - and the companies started charging for it. Looks like they're all making a bucketload of cash on SMSs (which are *quite* cheap for the companies themselves),and obviously they're not dropping the prices.
After all, people are willing to pay this much, thus they are charged this much...
Seeing how we can get (cheap) flat-rates on mobile phones here, I simply stopped using SMs.
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There might be crazy things about the whole telecom industry (corruption, monopolies, government control gone wrong...), but not having connection between the cost of an individual service and it's price is not one of them. It's just normal business, and every business does it.
Just think of the actual cost of ingredients in a cup of black coffee in a coffee shop... The cups and the place are there anyway, and that one cup worth of coffee would be thrown out soon if nobody bought it, so the cost is actually almost zero! Only the food and the sugar and the milk should cost, but the black coffee itself should be free! Anyting else is crazy! Or not.
Using your analogy, coffee, I'll go to my fave diner and order a cuppa joe. Hm. $1.06 and free refills. ... time passes
and here I am, hours later, drinking my 5th cuppa joe for free.
SMS is a totally overpriced rip-off and anyone that doesn't believe that suffers from delusional insanity.
So you spent hours at the diner, just drinking a lot of coffee for $1.06, possibly even hogging a place to sit and driving away more profitable customers? Then the owner probably made a loss, not profit, from your coffee spree. If every customer was like that, ie making the diner a loss by coming there just to drink a lot cheap coffee, then the free refills policy wouldn't last long.
However, if you also ate something, met a few friends who bought something too, etc, then it probably was very profitable for the owner to give you unlimited refills.
So, back to the actual topic: if operator gave you free unlimited SMS messages, would you spend more money on phone calls, and also get your friends to spend some money for the benefit of the mobile phone operator? Unlikely...
But I get your point. You don't want free market economy with businesses that try to maximize their profits, you want an economy where purpose of companies is to provide services to you at the minimal price. Now I'm sure you know that they tried (and are still trying) the latter in a few communist countries, while in some other parts of the world companies are expected to maximize their profits, not minimize their prices. It's funny how the real cost and price of services ends up being cheaper in the model where companies try to maximize their profits, and more expensive or even non-existent in a model where the intention is to have the lowest price...
Because you can't have it both ways. You can't take the ability of mobile telecom companies to decide their own prices in a competitive market (so you can lower the "overpriced" SMS prices), and still call it a free market.
Adding to my other post: You of course have full right, even obligation to complain about the prices you think are too high... That way you can maybe affect how people think about the pricing structure of their mobile phone services, and collectively start demanding and choosing cheaper SMS messages, even if it meant more expensive phone calls.
The marginal cost of a SMS is 0.
/.
They do have a little cost/opportunity. As a matter of fact SMS messages are sent on the control channel. Initially SMS were implemented in the GSM standard as a control system, just like the ICMP protocol of the IP stack. Then NOKIA though to implement a actual instant message function using SMS. The Contol channel is the channel that your mobile listens to in order to receive calls. So for receiving a SMS a control signal is sent. Since bandwidht is somehow limited on these channels it could happen that in a situation of massive usage of texting the control channel gets saturated and normal voice protocol initiation is disrupted. To prevent this carriers nowadays apply a kind of QoS delaying SMSs until there is no risk of congestion. So we can state that the marginal cost is 0 and the cost/opportunity is also 0
Another story is for the MMSs. Their cost/opportunity is even lower since they run almost enterely on GPRS thus using most bandwidht on normal data channels. Thus a MMS with pictures sounds and maybe video SHOULD cost less than a SMS.
So you wonder, why do I pay so much for a SMS or a MMS or even a Call: after the debts for the initial hardware infrastructure have been paid by the carrier you are still paying because of market segmentation (You wonâ(TM)t change the carrier on the fly) and a little monopoly (Almost impossible to start a new carrier from 0).
This hasn't been originally written by me. Found it some day while following links here on
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Unlimited free messages or talk time is not what I'm after though. I'm about fair pricing. If the actual cost of a sms message is a penny per dozen, then I expect to pay no more than 300%, or 3 cents per dozen. If the company is selling sms messages like hotcakes, I expect to pay a lot less, say 12 to 15% overhead, because the company is making boatloads of profit.
As with eating in a restaurant, what you use is little of the cost and the people who make sure you get served high-quality stuff in a timely manner are the bulk of the cost. Those towers don't just function without staff to oversee them. There's probably still enormous profit involved, but that's why the companies offer the service.
Again, you didn't understand what I meant by "wasted" bandwidth. Effectively, in GSM, there is a need for the phone to periodically (and often) connect to the Cell (and vice versa) as part of this connect, a small data packet is sent to and from. Either phone initiated, or cell initiated. This packet is part of the sub-band carriers, and is reserved away from call use. It will not take away any bandwidth from calls at all. This packet is extremely small, I have forgotten the exact size, but its somewhere along the 250 bytes size.
However, the current presence scheme does not use ALL of this packet, and there is a lot of empty space, doing nothing. SMS was traditionally slotted into this "wasted" space, which would otherwise be blank. One simpl reason is, that free SMSes would decrease amount of phone calls made. Therefore the cost of an SMS must reflect the cost of communicating the same thing over a phone call. The price should be optimized so that total revenue from both SMS and phone calls is maximized (also considering the peak network capacity etc). I do not know the situation in the USA, but in the UK, and most of europe, and probably the rest of the world. Amongst the public (not business) users, SMS already is used far more than phone calls. This is even considering in most cases, SMS communication can be far more expensive than the equivelent call.
Eg, a call to say:
"Darling I am stuck on the train will be late"
"what time will you be in"
"8:00 am"
"Ok, take care see you soon"
Would only take a minute and would cost about 10p, or normally part of the free minuites. The same conversation via SMS would reach 40p (4x10p messages). Though would more likely be a single message, and a possible response (10/20p).
Secondly the actual bandwith used:
a 160 char Text message uses 140 bytes for 10p. a 1 minuite phone call at 2G GSM (9600bps) would use 60 x 9600bits = 576000bits = 72000 bytes, for the same 10p call. This is actual usable bandwith. add overhead, etc, the actual bandwith is higher. Add to that, that phone calls are a QoS issue, where bandwidth HAS to be reserved during a phone call, and cannot be "shaped" in the way data can be.
With 3g, and 3.5G (HSDPA) with maximum bandwith approaching 3.5 MBps, and more. and with "data plans" such as my T-Mobile Web and Walk plus, which gives me effectively 3GB data transfer per month at ANY rate (2.5G GPRS, 3G UMTS, or 3.5G HSDPA) at £12 a month. Also I have just switched my contract to a T-Mobile "solo" package, which for £30 per month (and only a 30day contract, not 18 months, or two years), gives me 1400 minuets a month to any landline/mobile, and (finally)unlimited text. It just puts it all into perspective about what CAN be done, what is TECHNICALLY possible, and what is COMMERCIALLY possible.
But while people are willing to pay 10p per message, and look at bundles as "value" the companies will continue to cream their profits!
ITs the same reason why a HDMI cable costs £30 in Dixons, and the SAME cable, from an online retailer can cost £4. People pay for a perceived value (Digital is greater than analogue), and until their perceptions change, companies will be willign to charge for it.
Have a nice day!
Ridiculous. Those towers would work just as well if the normal SMS were free and they were entirely subsidized by "ringtones" and "dating" services, where the carrier takes 35% commission on all sales.
The towers need nearly zero maintenance as well. I know that. They have to be checked once every two or three years, and that's when the company wants them checked much more often than they have a chance to fail.
In a restaurant, you have to pay for the food, first. Then for the fixed costs, then the service. Those things are not multiplicable a zillion times at zero cost. Food is used only once, service is used only once. The profits are not enormous, they are obscene. There should be laws against large-scale organized price-fixing and abuse of position, don't you think?
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Well, I live in an area of heavy snow in winter and high winds and lots of lightning in the spring and summer. We tend to see technicians at the towers every few weeks.
The customer service people, the phone network admins, the billing department, and the management need to be paid, too. The management probably need to be paid less before the shareholders are paid less, because most US companies overpay top management ludicrously anyway.
I do agree that large-scale price fixing and abuse of market position should be illegal. Let's start with the gasoline industry, in which a daily price change takes about 5 minutes to make it to every station in a town of 115,000 people that covers 54 square miles, like Springfield IL. If that's not price fixing, then there's no meaning to the words.
SMS charges are somewhere down the line from that for me, since I receive them for free and rarely pay $0.10 to send one (new plans are $0.20 apiece, which is silly and outrageous). I can get 250 per month to send for $4.95 if I really need them. That's $0.02 apiece. Not bad. There's even a $9.95 for 750 package or $14.95 for unlimited. Unlimited for a family plan is $19.95 a month. Personally, I do pay $10 a month for unlimited data service on my phone, and I can use Yahoo! Mail or GMail from that if I'm desperate enough to need to use a little bitty keypad to send a message.
- Late 2001: $0.10 to send, $0.02 to receive.
- Circa 2003: $0.10 to send or receive.
- Circa 2005: $0.12 to send or receive.
- Circa 2007: $0.15 to send or receive.
- Today: $0.20 to send or receive.
(note that this does not include picture or media messaging which is $0.25)Now what is lovely is that they don't offer a text plan to go with my voice plan because it is obsolete (yeah, the "upgraded" one is more expensive and more restrictive). And so wonderful when they sent me a cheery reminder to get a text plan because "rates are going up". Yes, like the cost of sending a 140 byte message is a serious burden on their network? Please.
I guess I'm just appalled by the fact that my text rate went up 1000% since I first started using it. Unbelievable. This is complete fleecing and introducing artificial rate increases.
waah.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...