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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!""
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.
No Wonder ET wants to call home
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.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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?
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
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.)
You, sir, must have a degree in advanced compression algorithms.
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.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.