The New York Times recently ran a story about the hidden cost of text messaging.
I’ve always wondered why wireless carriers charge so much for text messages. Many service plans include a number of monthly SMS messages; my iPhone plan includes 200 messages, which is more than enough for me. But if I were to exceed that number, I’d be charged $0.20 per message. This seems to be a fairly average price across the board.
So, how much does it really cost your wireless provider to send that little bit of text to your friend? Well, according to the New York Times – nothing.
That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.
(emphasis mine)
What they found out is that the wireless companies are sending your SMS messages along channels that are being used regardless of whether there’s a message to send or not.
On top of that, text messages take up very little space. If you’ve shopped for a new hard drive in the last few months, you know that storage is cheap these days. You can find a 1TB (~1,000GB) hard drive for $100 if you know where to look. To get an idea of just how small a text message might be, I created a simple Text file on my C: drive (test.txt) and entered “This is a test message for a file. It doesn’t say anything of importance.” The file is 73 bytes.
In 2008, approximately 2.5 trillion text messages were sent. If we use 73 bytes as an average size, that comes out to about 182.5 terabytes worth of data. In the article, they mention Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, so if we divide this data among just those four wireless providers, we get 45.625 TB worth of data for each provider. So for less than $5,000 any of these cellular providers could buy enough storage space for a years worth of text messages.
Given this information, the wireless providers would be able to cover these costs many times over, even if they only charged each customer’s first text message. Granted, this isn’t how it works, exactly, but it helps to put it in perspective.
The bottom line: cellular service providers are charging us for a service that costs them virtually nothing; all they have to do is count the cash.
I love tech, but don’t have as much time or money to spend on it as I’d like. I get what I need to sustain my Geek vicariously through other sources and pass it along to you.
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Your articles are great, shame you get very few comments,- keep up the great work!
Thanks, I really appreciate it. Keep visiting, and bring friends!