As stated in the article, Senator Herb Kohl became suspicious after realizing that the cost of a text message doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents from 2005 to 2008 without any clear reason. After launching an investigation, Kohl discovered that the carriers were extremely secretive about releasing data about the method by which text messages are sent and the costs of that method. Professor Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, explained in the NY Times article that the method of transmission of text messages does not add any additional cost for carriers. Zero, none! The only costs stem from the storage of text messages, which Keshav says costs about $100 per terabyte or less.
RantBlogger Investigates
Armed with this data, I decided to do my own investigation to find exactly how high the markup is for the price of a text message. Let’s assume that all text messages sent in the U.S. are exactly the maximum size allowed, 160 characters. That translates to 160 bytes of storage space per message. One terabyte is equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and a terabyte costs $100 to store.
Therefore, the cost of storing and transmitting one text message is approximately $0.00000001 or $1-8. If carriers charge $.20 per text message, that means the markup is almost 20,000,000%!
This is simply outrageous. Now, there are a few things that my calculations did not take into account. The size of a text message may be more than 160 bytes depending on how the file is saved on the hard drive. Techies will point out that file size and the size on a disk are two different things. This would still leave the markup at a percentage of several million.
Another thing to remember is that the space taken by text messages is temporary. Once they are transmitted, the data is deleted and the space is recovered. Thus, the cost of storing messages is likely to be even lower than I’ve predicted. The NY Times article states that 2.5 trillion text messages were sent in the U.S. this year. Sounds like a lot, right? Not really. The cost of storing all those messages (remember, transmission is free) is no more than $25,000.
Yes, the total cost to carriers for ALL the text messages sent in the U.S. this year is no more than $25,000!
And how many millions of dollars do carriers get from texting fees? Who knows. The only thing I can conclude is that they’re making absurd profits off of their customers from text messaging charges. Please digg, stumble, reddit, and share this article in every way possible so we can end this insanity!
http://www.rantblogger.com/the-real-cost-of-text-messages/
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