CNET has a post up about an issue that has been bothering me for quite awhile; the overinflated price of text messages. Looking at the new iPhone is what really drove this home for me. Are you seriously trying to tell me that I can use your “super-fast” 3g network to download as many whole webpages as I want a month for only $30, while at the same time charging me an extra $5 just to send/receive 200 text messages? I think there might be a little bit of a disparity here. Gthing does some math comparing the cost of bytes, if you were to transfer a song through texting:
Cost to transfer 2560 songs:
From my ISP: $1
Via SMS messaging: $15,339,212.80But wait, there’s more!
When calculating SMS charges, most people don’t take into consideration that the message is really being paid for twice! If I send a message to another AT&T user, I am paying to send it AND they’re paying to receive it! This should probably be illegal, but that’s for another discussion.
So how much does an SMS message actually cost? Not 20 cents - but 40 cents! This doubles all of my numbers above.
While no one is saying that cellular service should have the same bandwidth at the same cost as your ISP, next time you send a text think about how much it is costing you and how cheap it is for your cellular service provider.
