True cost of SMS'

[Napalm]

Shamelessly stolen from /.  but very relevant to SA.

 

I just found out that AT&T (A-fee&fee?) is raising their

text message pricing. When I first signed up for AT&T 6 or so years

ago it cost 10 cents to send an SMS message, and it was free to receive

them.

When AT&T switched to Cingular the price of sending a message

dropped to 5 cents, but they started charging for incoming texts - also

5 cents. Assuming you send a message for every message you receive,

this works out at about the same price as before.

AT&T came back online and phased out the CIngular brand name,

and prices were again changed. This time to 15 cents each way.

More changes have taken place that I can?t quite remember. At one

point text messages were 10 cents either way, and at another point they

even included MMS (multimedia messages) at the same price as SMS.

As of March SMS messages on AT&T will cost 20 cents and MMS will cost 30 cents - both to send a receive.

So let?s do some math here, and figure out how much this simple transmission is actually costing us.

A standard SMS message contains up to 140 bytes (1120 bits) of data

- this takes care of the 160 characters allowed in your text message.

This might not make sense at first, until you realize that SMS uses 7 -

not 8 - bit characters - leaving you with 128 possible character values

instead of the normal 256. So 1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.

So our total message length is about a tenth of a kilobyte

(.13671875 Kbytes). In terms that the iPod generation would understand

- if you had an iPod with a tenth of a kilobyte you could fit 1/4000th

of a song on it. I assume here and for the rest of this article that 1

song = 4 Megabytes.

If you divide 140 (the total number of bytes available to you) by 20

(the cost per message), you find that you are paying 1 cent for every 7

bytes of data. This leaves you with a cost of $1,497.97 for the

1024Kbytes contained in a single megabyte. iPod users: It would cost

you $5,991.88 to transfer - not even to buy - a single song via SMS.

By comparison, I pay $50 a month for a soft bandwidth limit of 500

gigabytes through a local ISP. That comes out to 512,000 megabytes or

10,240 megabytes to the dollar. This allows me to transfer 2,560 songs

for the same price as a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger off the value menu at

Wendy?s: $1. I will use this my standard measurement for the rest of

this article.

So far I can make the following statements concerning the costs of bandwidth:

Cost to transfer 2560 songs:

From my ISP: $1

 

Via SMS messaging: $15,339,212.80

But 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.

Furthermore, my above figures estimate that people actually use all

160 characters available to them. Say people on average actually only

used half of that (which is still being generous) - then their price of

data has again doubled from the numbers I gave above!

Making adjustments for both of the above statements, we realize that

our above number isn?t even close to correct! Corrected, the comparison

looks more like this:

COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:

via my ISP: $1

 

via SMS: $61,356,851.20

 

 

Phew! THAT is premium data! It?s no wonder that SMS texting alone is a 100 Billion dollar a year industry!

 

 

[GIRR]

Use mxit

[bob_the_builder]

Have a you had a Wendy's Cheese Burger? I like Wendy's.

[fandacious]

Dont sms mp3's to your friends

[Minion]

If he had to use Telkom ADSL the cost would probably work out the same 

[rheinoh]

If he had to use Telkom ADSL the cost would probably work out the same 

 

[AndreZA]

When I wanted to phone a friend (I actually did know the answer) in the US of everyting-is-so-rosie A she asked me not to use my cell because they get charged for the call aswell. When I tried to phone another friend on his birthday they land line simply did not accept cell calls. They dissabled it so that they do not have to pay for it.