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!""

Comments

Interesting way to look at it

[faloi]

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.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[The_Quinn]

Sprint, for one, offers unlimited text, voice, data, etc. for less than $100 a month - so I don't see the "squeeze" you are referring to.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[Hatta]

Right. This is no different than paying $4 for a hot dog at a ball park when you could get the same hot dog at home for $0.25. Yeah it's a ripoff, but you're a captive audience. If you don't like it, wait until you get home.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[Hyppy]

The profit margin on many independent vendors' food at sporting events is not as high as you think. You'd better believe that they have to pay through the nose to be able to hawk their concessions. Either way, it's not a 4-digit profit margin by ANY stretch of the imagination.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[CastrTroy]

Not for the actual concession operators, but that $4 is going somewhere. Most likely to the owners of the baseball team, or the player's salaries, or to the owners of the stadium.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[InsaneProcessor]

Sprint, for one, offers unlimited text, voice, data, etc. for less than $100 a month - so I don't see the "squeeze" you are referring to.

You, my friend, have no concept of your expenses and how much you waste. I pay $100 for 4 phones with voice mail and all of the fancy features. I get 1000 minutes a month anywhere in the US and unlimited to any T-mobile phones. They want to charge me $0.15 per message that I receive. I have no control over anyone sening me messages so I, as a customer, am screwed. I don't even want this service and am forced to pay for it anyway. They will not turn it off.

This is highway robbery and is wrong! How do we stop this?

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[tompaulco]

I, on the other hand, find the spoken word to be much more adaptable in getting the point across. I could end up writing paragraphs trying to anticipate every possible misunderstanding, or I could just call someone and see how they are responding to my point and adjust accordingly. I just don't understand how people can spend an hour texting back and forth a couple of paragraphs worth of information when they could have picked up the phone and had the conversation finished in 3 minutes.
Maybe it is because I am getting older or busier, but I just don't have time for text messaging.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[magarity]

What they still haven't revealed is how they got the Hubble to SMS them to be able to compare to the phone to phone SMS cost.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[rfunches]

I'm sure they have a way of putting a block on a particular service -- I've been with Cingular (before the AT&T merge) and Sprint and both of them can block SMS, you just have to call and push the CSR to do it. And if they tell you they can't, ask for next-tier support. If they tell you no, threaten to take the matter up with your state's AG and the FCC. That usually gets a quick response. (If Sprint can do it, and their customer service is quite possibly the worst I've ever encountered, then T-Mobile can do it.)

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[ceoyoyo]

A better analogy would be the old joke about the lemonade being ten cents but the cup is a dollar.

The carriers will cell you data transfer in the form of voice for a somewhat inflated price. They'll sell you data transfer in the form of arbitrary data for another price, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, depending on where you live. Or they'll sell you data transfer in the form of text messages for an insanely inflated price.

The lemonade is reasonably priced, but if you want it in a cup then you're going to pay through the nose.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[maxume]

You don't mean free minutes, you mean minutes that you pay for regardless of whether you use them or not. They're anything but free.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[LilGuy]

I pay about $32.50 every 2 months for a prepaid phone. I get texting at about $.50 a message and voice calls are $.10 a minute with a 1 minute minimum. That $32.50 gets me 400 minutes which roll over to the next 2 months if I don't use them.

I really can't fathom how people can spend $100 a month for a phone service. Surfing the net is what I do at home or at school... not while I'm driving 90 down the interstate.

Mobile phones are stupidly expensive..

[LingNoi]

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.

Re:Mobile phones are stupidly expensive..

[jsebrech]

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..

It's actually quite clever. By throwing in "freebies", they can take them away at any time. Just like they throw around temporary discounts "sign up for 12 months, and the first 6 months you only pay ..."

The more a company does this, the less likely I am to do business with them. It demonstrates an inherent lack of commitment to the existing customers (who usually don't get the freebies).

is this a dupe--or just inisghtful

[way2trivial]

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

Re:is this a dupe--or just inisghtful

[Kjella]

Lack of competition and cost awareness. Really.

For example, take the data rates while abroad. Do you really think the extra cost of transferring data across the world (you know, like you're doing right now) justified a price that's often tens of dollars per megabyte? Or that in-flight calls really cost that much? They charge what people will pay, simple as that.

Real Cost?

[SOOPRcow]

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.

Re:Real Cost?

[morethanapapercert]

I seem to recall reading somewhere recently that sending text messages via SMS costs North American mobile carriers essentially nothing. The reason being that apparently cell networks have a reserved amount of bandwidth exclusively for the use of control signals. If I recall correctly, the established standards and protocols require this control signal allowance but in current practice it is either totally unused or drastically underused. SMS messages are sent using that control signal bandwidth and protocol so it is being sent using space that wasn't being used anyway. Thus the net cost of handling a text message is zero. (There may be costs in passing along text messages to another carrier on another network, that would depend on what peering agreements are in place I think.)

ET

[Davemania]

No Wonder ET wants to call home

Markup

[esocid]

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?

Double dipping

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Double dipping

[stevey]

That's primarily an issue with American carriers.

In the UK, where I am, & Europe, we pay to send messages, and make phone calls, but to receive either is free.

Re:Double dipping

[psmears]

And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent. Only in the US. In the UK (and the rest of Europe, AFAIK) the telcos don't charge you for receiving texts—and even the idea of them doing so is considered absurd.

Re:Double dipping

[Thaelon]

And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent.

Only in the US. In the UK (and the rest of Europe, AFAIK) the telcos don't charge you for receiving texts--and even the idea of them doing so is considered absurd.

Oh, believe me, we in the US consider it absurd too. But when every carrier available to you does it, it doesn't bleedin' matter what we think, does it?

Re:Double dipping

[_xeno_]

I don't really care about being charged minutes to receive calls - it seems fair enough, I'm using air time. I can check the caller ID and refuse the call if I don't want to be charged. It hasn't been a big deal.

Getting dinged $0.20 per spam SMS? That's a bit more annoying. There's no way to refuse a text message (on Sprint, at least). And thanks to the email-to-SMS gateway, the spammer doesn't get charged a penny. (I'm noticing that a huge percentage of spam I receive on my regular account is, for some strange reason, under 160 characters.)

It's even more annoying because I have an unlimited data plan - I can send and receive unlimited email from my Gmail account. I can view satellite imagery on Google Maps, which I'm fairly sure involves more data transfer than an SMS. But receive one text message? Boom, $0.20 charge.

Re:Double dipping

[TheRaven64]

Option 3:

Have a day when everyone in the country sends an SMS to their senator and their representative and see how long the practice is allowed to stand when every politician has mobile phone bills in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Re:Double dipping

[Lisandro]

Only in the US. In the UK (and the rest of Europe, AFAIK) the telcos don't charge you for receiving textsand even the idea of them doing so is considered absurd.

Ditto for most Lain American countries. SMS aren't exactly cheap down here, but receiving is always free of charge.

Re:Double dipping

[jc42]

(I wonder if anyone's ever considered investigating these companies for racketeering - wouldn't surprise me even remotely if they were colluding on these things)

Nah; they probably haven't been "colluding" in any legal sense. They can probably show in court that they haven't gotten together to arrange prices.

The term you're looking for is "gentlemen's agreement", which has a long history in the business world, and is the standard way of getting around any such government regulation. Now with the Internet, it's easier than ever for companies to align policies and prices without doing any direct communication. Each company just keeps track of its competitors' policies and prices, and makes sure that their own are roughly the same. They're also careful to maintain slight variations, as "proof" that there's no collusion.

This can be broken in two ways. One is for a company to suddenly introduce a much better deal with customers. This doesn't happen often, because there are usually strong barriers to entry. This means that the change would have to be done by one of the existing companies, and their management has the sense to not do that. This has happened in the past, when a large outside company with sufficient funds was able to break into a market. A major example recently was the entry of Japanese auto companies into the American market back in the 1960s and 1970s.

The other way to break a gentlemen's agreement is via government action. We had a major telecom example of this in the US in the 1970s, when the government invalidated the companies' contract terms forbidding "foreign attachments". Suddenly things like modems and phones with new features became possible, and we had an explosion of new products that the phone companies had managed to block for the previous century.

But it's rather rare for government regulators to make such enabling changes. This is the current situation with cell phones, where there appears to be regulation and competition, but the regulative agencies are pretty much ruled by the companies. So gentlemen's agreements are the way things are organized, and the companies can all say "Sign our contract or go without entirely". They know that their competitors' contracts differ only trivially, the regulators are mostly there to prevent entry of new competitors, and there's no way for mere customers to do anything about it.

Re:Double dipping

[Shakrai]

and since Europe is standardized on GSM there's no issues like in America where people on different operators sometimes can't even message each other

Where the hell did you get that idea from? I'm not aware of any carrier whose customers can't message people on another carrier. And what does GSM have to do with that? Different carriers being able to communicate with each other has nothing to do with the underlying cellular technology and everything to do with routing on the global POTS network.

You pay extra for calling abroad, even from America, so why is it not fair to pay the extra cash for routing the call through wireless equipment?

Because you are effectively making your friends pay for your privilege of having a wireless phone. In the American model the wireless customer pays for that privilege and the people seeking to call him aren't penalized because of his choice of phone service.

Like I said, I don't pretend to know which one is more "fair" and I'm not really interested in a debate about it -- my original point was that pointing out that Europe gets free incoming calls is only half the story.

SMS was initially free

[awjr]

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.

5p per message isn't that bad

[El_Muerte_TDS]

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.

Re:5p per message isn't that bad

[nogginthenog]

5p is far too low. The average in the UK is probably double that.

Re:5p per message isn't that bad

[KingJ]

It varies, with most networks it's around 10p, but some do offer 'bundles' which work out at 5p per text. The vast majority though pay 10p I suspect. Complete ripoff, I try not to text, especially if I know it's going to be one of those 'conversation' texts.

At least we don't pay for receiving texts/calls. That idea just seems absurd to me.

[Sigh...] Not again...

[superphreak]

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...

old chatter

[luvtheedragon]

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.

Total Bullshit from the very beginning

[EdIII]

and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p

That is an assumption and most likely pretty conservative. There are plenty of SMS text messages sent/received by complete idiots that spend 99c per message. I am not attempting to troll here either. Those people are COMPLETE IDIOTS to spend that kind of money on a simple text message. I am always reminded of the saying, "A fool and his money are soon parted".

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.

Re:Total Bullshit from the very beginning

[Splab]

No they can't.

SMS is for most people instant messaging - just like E-mail has become. Yes this is not what was intended, but this is what consumers expect. If a telecom doesn't deliver SMS within a very small timeframe people will find a new carrier.

Re:Total Bullshit from the very beginning

[Splab]

No they wont.

SMS is expected to arrive instantly these days. Here in Denmark SMS can cost down to 1 øre while just making a call is 25 øre, so people have begun using SMS as communication instead of calls - and thus expect it to be instant.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the standard rate for text messaging in the UK is 10p, not 5p

This just in...

[DanWS6]

Ink for your printer is more expensive than gasoline for your car. Where's the justice?

Re:This just in...

[caluml]

... $120... $130... $140... But not for long!

Re:This just in...

[Hyppy]

HP sells their inkjet ink for nearly 8,000 USD per gallon. Interestingly enough, many smaller companies who specialize in refill packs sell 5-gallon jugs of ink for around 350 USD. That's only 70 USD or so a gallon.

We're climbing there, but who is to say that the rising cost of oil won't proportionally increase the cost of ink?

Re:This just in...

[tepples]

HP sells their inkjet ink for nearly 8,000 USD per gallon. That's because each ink tank comes with a print head that hasn't yet been clogged with ink.

Re:Math is HARD

[Crazy Man on Fire]

160 characters * (7 bits/character) * (1 byte/8 bits) = 140 bytes

Re:Math is HARD

[Hyppy]

TFA is talking about the transfer of data, not how many little bits are actually involved in the transaction. Headers and transmission overhead are not data. If you downloaded a CD ISO, you would not say that you downloaded 946MB and include "overhead" in your figure. Did you include your name and the class number in the word count for your papers in college?

The opposite is true in Japan

[Guanine]

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?

Re:The opposite is true in Japan

[taupter]

... and typing those Kanji in a mobile phone keyboard must be a royal PITA btw. :)

Re:The opposite is true in Japan

[blueforce]

You're correct. I was just in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. In most places - restaurants, buses, trains, etc. - it's expressly forbidden to talk on mobile phones. But look around and you see nearly everyone's thumbs going a million miles per hour.

Re:The opposite is true in Japan

[Kanasta]

in Japan nobody uses SMS. Phones send/rec proper emails with a proper email address. Costs start from 0.9yen, going up to 2-3yen if you send 5000 character mails.

Re:Math is HARD

[Art Popp]

First off, they're kinda right for the wrong reasons.

The "delivered" portion of the short message service (SMS) message is 140 characters and they do combine the unused 8th bits to yield 160 7 bit ascii characters per message. I don't know how much of the hubble's overhead was included in the article's 8.85 GBP per megabyte.

While greed is always a factor with big corporations, many of the charges put in place have primary purpose of keeping capacity in check. While the marketing folk at big telecomm corporations love the word "unlimited" it creates nightmares for the engineering folk who find that their SS7 network completely congested. They investitage and find that while it was designed to carry 30 SMSs per day for the 30 million subscribers for which it was scaled is now at it's limit because of an open source project that breaks up TCP packets and transmits them over SMS and allows people to download pr0n to their restrictive countries over SMS.

My favorite carrier offers unlimited texting for $20 per month. The way his daughters send messages he's getting them at 1/4 cent apiece.

So, slightly cheaper than from the Hubble! Score!

I think my head just exploded

[argmanah]

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 /.

Japan text messaging

[Khisanth Magus]

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.

Re:Math is HARD

[Lennie]

It doesn't matter, most textmessages are not 160 characters anyway.

Re:Math is HARD

[LMacG]

> Did you include your name and the class number in the word count for your papers in college?

Hell yes! Month day and year, too.

Yeah, but Hubble is only one station

[tjstork]

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.

So is this the time to bring up ...

[SengirV]

Printer ink versus a gallon of gas?

Re:So is this the time to bring up ...

[raynet]

I think soon it might be cheaper to drive with non-branded printer ink.

Re:Math is HARD

[punkass]

"On this most glorious Twelfth Day of May, Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight"

Re:Math is HARD

[theeddie55]

It doesn't matter, most textmessages are not 160 characters anyway.
mine are... I like to get my moneys worth.

Re:Other costs?

[MozeeToby]

I'm not sure the exact costs that the carriers incure when people send a text message but I do remember this:

After the freeway collapse in Mineapollis last year, the cell companies told people to text rather than call in large emergencies because it uses significantly less resources.

Re:and the infrastructure cost doesn't matter?

[EdIII]

because the whole idea that cell towers and the like just sprouted like weeds is appealing but they are costly.

That only sounds insightful. The cell towers in question provide the infrastructure for SMS/VOICE/DATA all at the same time. The cost of the tower is not actually relevant to your argument at all since it applies equally to all the products being provided.

Actually the comparison is bogus because its apple's and oranges. They have nothing in common other than that word "transmit"

Exactly the opposite in fact. Apples/Apples/Apples. Whether or not it is a SMS message, Voice call, or Data connection it is all just digital communications between the cellular handset and the towers. If you were to compare it to the Internet, the cell towers would be your connection and SMS/VOICE/DATA would just be different services communicating on the same foundation of TCP/IP. It's all just packets of data when you get down to it.

How much did it cost to deploy and manage a network capable of servicing text messages?

The best question you have asked so far. I don't know the answer either, but I do KNOW that we can compare that directly with the cost to deploy and manage a network capable of handling digital voice communications.

How much did it cost to deploy the Hubble, let alone a system to manage it?

That question was answered in the article itself by nobody less than NASA themselves. So the data he is using there is accurate.

You are trying to consider the actual costs of a SMS infrastructure. However, you really only need to consider how much more difficult it is to establish a two-way voice communication than send a SMS text message.

In order of difficulty, it starts with a voice conversation being the most difficult, a data session being the 2nd most difficult (I may be wrong here, data could be 1st for all I know), and lastly sending and acknowledging receipt of a SMS message. When you start to think about that ask yourself if a static 160 character SMS message really costs 20-25% of a minute of real time telephone conversation.

That is the real "dirty" truth. Sending a SMS text message only requires a very short transmission of data and a receipt being sent back from the handset. If you were to attempt to compare that "Apple" to the "Orange" that is a 60 second slice of a voice call, you would find that a 60 second voice call is really just about a thousand of those little SMS messages being sent back and forth between the tower and handset. I came up with that number by assuming that a voice call will require at least 2.5KB/s of data for a decent quality connection. Take 2500 bytes and divide that by 140 bytes (from the article) and you get approx. 18 SMS messages per second of voice, which is 1080 SMS messages per minute.

A SMS message is at most 1/1000th of the difficulty of sending and receiving voice data. There is no "separate" cell tower infrastructure that is more complex, and thus more costly, than the voice/data infrastructure. SMS was a tiny little added feature that turned into something else along the way, namely a astronomically high margin product.

I am not even really that mad at them. They found a price point that people were willing to pay for a product that cost them far far less to "produce". I just happened to be one of the people that knew how high their margin really was and decided to not pay them for it. Caveat Emptor.

Re:Liquid Nitrogen cheaper than beer

[the brown guy]

And liquid Nitrogen is cheaper to buy than beer. You're obviously drinking way too expensive beer, try a 40 of old english malt liquor, sure it tastes nasty, but it's better than liquid nitrogen. (Or solid/gaseous nitrogen for that matter.)

Re:Math is HARD

[phantomfive]

Where'd these guys come from, the Verizon School of Mathematics If it were the Verizon school of mathematics, they would charge you for the whole 8 bits (even if it's just seven per character), plus the overhead, plus extra for the line noise.

Re:Math is HARD

[praxis]

"mine are... I like to get my moneys worth" (sic on the moneys) is not 160 characters!

Re:Math is HARD

[gid]

yeah, but it's easy to compress "hahahahahahahhahahahaha"

Re:Other costs?

[praxis]

You're probably right that text messaging takes fewer resources but the little devil on my shoulder just hinted to me that that statement could have been motivated by their desire to increase their profit.

cost of SMS? it's what people will pay

[petes_PoV]

> while the price of SMS messages have risen so egregiously?

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!

Re:Math is HARD

[Sique]

Not exactly. We are talking purely payload, and the payload of an SMS is 1120 bit. We don't care about ethernet frames occuring while sending the SMS within the provider network, we don't care about traffic due to the database requests to find the actual location of the target mobile phone, we just want to know: Here we have a certain amount of information, expressed in a certain amount of bits. How much would it cost to transfer it from point A to point B via system S?

Re:Math is HARD

[bishiraver]

They use the call notification signal (the signal that tells your cellphone there's an incoming call and who it's from) to transmit the SMS in pretty direct binary. There's a start and stop code so that your phone doesn't actually ring like it's a regular phonecall.

Re:Math is HARD

[Luyseyal]

While greed is always a factor with big corporations, many of the charges put in place have primary purpose of keeping capacity in check. While the marketing folk at big telecomm corporations love the word "unlimited" it creates nightmares for the engineering folk who find that their SS7 network completely congested. They investitage and find that while it was designed to carry 30 SMSs per day for the 30 million subscribers for which it was scaled is now at it's limit because of an open source project that breaks up TCP packets and transmits them over SMS and allows people to download pr0n to their restrictive countries over SMS.

Do you have a URL for an article that states that the SMS network is so overwhelmed with text messages that all non-unlimited (limited) customers must subsidize their unlimited brethren at an incredible mark-up?

'Cause, really, I think it makes far more sense that carriers abuse their captive audience with outrageous pricing of extremely inexpensive commodity SMS service. But I've been wrong before.

Cheers,
-l

Re:Math is HARD

[__aaxwdb6741]

You, sir, must have a degree in advanced compression algorithms.

Re:and the infrastructure cost doesn't matter?

[Guppy06]

"because the whole idea that cell towers and the like just sprouted like weeds is appealing but they are costly."

The towers were there long before anybody thought of SMS.

"How much did it cost to deploy and manage a network capable of servicing text messages?"

Small, best-effort text messages? Oh, I'd wager it's at least an order of magnitude less than the cost of switched networks capable of real-time voice transmission.

"Both relied on much existing infrastructure but I have to wonder, whats the preoccupation with texting?"

For me, it's because I get billed $0.20 for every wrong number and/or spam I receive. I've never sent an SMS message in my life and I don't anticipate that changing any time soon. Combine that with the price it cost the sender to send it and it's about enough for the USPS to process physical media. Why send a few dozen characters when you could send them a postcard with a pretty picture on it for less? Or for slightly more than what it costs to both send and receive a text message, you could mail them a DVD.

"Are we that boring we need to bombard everyone around us to prove we are alive?"

I'm more concerned with the phone companies bombarding me with frivolous charges.

Re:and the infrastructure cost doesn't matter?

[maxume]

7 people with legitimate uses and 200,000 spazzes does not "we" make.

Re:Math is HARD

[theeddie55]

True, and if I were posting on slashdot via sms I'd have waited until I had more to say. And to correct my typo, I like to get my money's worth. That's 160 char

Re:Math is HARD

[theeddie55]

acters.

Re:Math is HARD, idiocy comes natural

[camg188]

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.

Re:Math is HARD

[Thundersnatch]

On this most glorious Twelfth Day of May, Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight

I went to a Catholic University, you insensitive clod!

Re:Math is HARD

[maxwell demon]

On this most glorious Twelfth Day of May, Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight

I went to a Catholic University, you insensitive clod!

Ok: Ad diem gloriosum duodecimus Martii, anno domini duo mille et octem

(I hope my latin isn't too wrong ...)

Re:Math is HARD

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

acters. That'll be 20 cents please. We appreciate your business!

Re:Math is HARD, idiocy comes natural

[Bryansix]

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.

Re:Math is HARD

[BarryJacobsen]

Each of my little sisters (one is 12 other is 14) sends over 7,000 messages a month, minimum. That's 233 per day from each. They live in a small town of roughly 1,200 people - there's only 30 kids in their class. I can only imagine how large that number would be if they went to a larger school. Unlimited text messaging keeps my parents out of the poor house.

Re:Math is HARD

[Thundersnatch]

I was an engineer. What is this "latin" of which you speak?

Overhead

[iamlucky13]

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.

Re:Math is HARD, idiocy comes natural

[cluckshot]

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.

Lameness of it all

[jroysdon]

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.

Re:Math is HARD, idiocy comes natural

[SenseiLeNoir]

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.