As someone who works with mobile phone payment systems, I can tell you that SMS is not free, you still have to pay for the SMSC and more specifically you pay for the SMS billing platform (Rating is no fun). It obviously costs the operator more to charge for 1,000 x 160 character individual SMSs than it would to charge for a single transaction of 160,000 bytes. I'm not saying SMSs are cheap (They are a cash cow) but you're not comparing like for like and it's definitely not free to the operator.
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As someone who works with mobile phone payment systems, I can tell you that SMS is not free, you still have to pay for the SMSC and more specifically you pay for the SMS billing platform (Rating is no fun). It obviously costs the operator more to charge for 1,000 x 160 character individual SMSs than it would to charge for a single transaction of 160,000 bytes. I'm not saying SMSs are cheap (They are a cash cow) but you're not comparing like for like and it's definitely not free to the operator.
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