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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!""
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
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.
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.
In the Netherlands 0.25 euro (16p or $0.38) per message is quite common. For that price I can call 1.67 minutes.
But that doesn't matter for me. I don't use text messages for the simple reason that I don't think it's worth the price.
So when you factor in these novelty SMS messages, the ratio becomes much worse.
I have never seen any hard data on the actual costs of sending a SMS message across GSM/CDMA cell towers, but I expect that the profit margins on a SMS message make Monster look positively razor thin with it's own margins.
The reason why anyone with a brain (even a damaged/inebriated/mutated one) can see how ridiculous the price points on SMS is pretty simple.
Take a mid-range T-Mobile calling plan. Say the individual 1000 minutes for 49.99$. 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.
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?
160 characters * (7 bits/character) * (1 byte/8 bits) = 140 bytes
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?
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?
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!
It doesn't matter, most textmessages are not 160 characters anyway.
New things are always on the horizon
> 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.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
"On this most glorious Twelfth Day of May, Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight"
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
I think soon it might be cheaper to drive with non-branded printer ink.
- Raynet --> .
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.
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.
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.
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.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Qxe4
yeah, but it's easy to compress "hahahahahahahhahahahaha"
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
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?
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.
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
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You, sir, must have a degree in advanced compression algorithms.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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