RANT! $1,310 Per Megabyte For Text Messages
I was preparing all of my wrath to write a rant on higher text messages when this post by Nicholas Deleon of CrunchGear stole my thunder. Nicholas did some basic math and found that at $0.20 per 160 bytes translates into $1,310 for one megabyte (1,048,576 bytes) of text messages. Note: This assumes that you use all 160 characters of each text message.
Even if you have a 200 text message plan you are still paying 2.5 cents per text message.
I could not agree with Nicholas more. Then one of the comments by Marc reminded me of this article from back in the day. Some bored Scientist from Leicester had free time to calculate that it cost 4 times more to send a text message to a friend than it costs NASA to send the same data to the moon!
And yet I still have a $5 text message plan. (Muttering to myself!)
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July 2nd, 2008 09:50
I agree that is crazy (nice to have unlimited for $15) but I average 2500 a month. However if you figure the math on 160 bytes into 1MB, you are looking at 6553.6 txt messages to reach that goal. I am sure that a lot of people have done it, but I am also sure they are/were on unlimited txting. Still crazy though.
July 2nd, 2008 09:55
Yeah its just crazy that I pay $45 on AT&T for unlimited data and then get hosed on SMS charges that are essentially tiny packets of data.
July 2nd, 2008 12:30
[...] know 2 rants in one day is a bit much but I am curious to learn what happened to this promising application. We told [...]
July 2nd, 2008 14:06
“are essentially tiny packets of data.”
Well, sorta. SMS is sent via your cellular voice service, NOT your data service. SMS works ubiquitously regardless of if a user has a data service or not, hence the carriers feel they can charge these extra fees for it. I was paying $10/month extra for unlimited SMS via Verizon, but found that I was MAYBE receiving 100 and sending 10 or 15 a month. Those 100 or so I was receiving are all data services (sports and weather) I can get via Viigo Tango now for free, and the wife and I can PIN/BBMessenger each other, so I’ve canceled that $10/month as well as enabled the SMS block that Verizon offers (so I don’t get hit with unwanted incoming SMS charges).
September 4th, 2008 04:08
[...] being charged even more text messages (about $1310 per megabyte) [...]