True cost of SMS messages, a bigger rip off than printer ink?


iphone_sms.jpgThere was a huge furore over the cost of printer ink which ran into $700 per liter and was more expensive than blood and top notch booze. Eventually you pay more for two ink cartridges than a new printer. A bigger rip off than printer ink is text messaging something which all of us do everyday. Text messaging started 15 years ago in Finland and by estimates 1.8 billion users generated $100 billion of revenue in 2007 from texting alone. How big is that? Take all of hollywood movie box office revenues worldwide. Add all of the global music industry revenues. And add all of videogaming revenues around the world. Even all those three together, we don’t reach 100 billion. So what is the true cost of sending a SMS? Here are some interesting facts
– As of March SMS messages on AT&T will cost 20 cents and MMS will cost 30 cents – both to send a receive.
– The total message length is 160 characters which is one tenth of a kilobyte. (1024 kilobytes = 1 Megabyte). If you had an iPod with a tenth of a kilobyte you could fit 1/4000th of a song on it. Assuming 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.
– Most ISP’s charge around $20 for 500GB soft bandwidth limit which comes to 10,240 Megabytes to the dollar.
– Comparatively it will cost $1 to transfer 2560 songs form your ISP, transferring the same amount via SMS messaging will cost $15,339,212.80. The same amount can get you 10 Bugatti Veyron’s.
(More after the jump)


When you send a message to a friend you pay to send it and your friend pays to receive it so the cost of sending a message is actually around 40 cents. Furthermore, with the advent of SMS lingo people on an average use less than 160 characters to send messages. 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 given above!
Costs of transferring 2560 MP3’s
From the ISP: $2 (Taking into consideration that you pay the same amount for downloading)
via SMS: $61,356,851.20. This amount of money can get you 40 Veyron’s.
What does the SMS stand against hand delivery of data?
According to Google a standard page has 200 words, an average English word is 5 characters long, a sheet of paper weighs about 4.5 grams and U.S. postal service allows your letters to weigh up to 1 ounce before charging more. So you could send 6 sheets of paper, minus 1 for the envelope. If you write on both sides that gives you 2500 words (10 pages x 250 words) which is equal to 14Kbytes for 41 cents. To transfer an MP3 using this method, we would be looking at about $119.95.
Costs of transferring 2560 MP3’s
TCP/IP: $1
TCP/SMS: $61,356,851.20
TCP/USPS: $307,072.00 (Bits written out on paper)
So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.
Hats off to Sam.


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