The True Cost of SMS Messages 583
nilbog writes "What's the actual cost of sending SMS messages? This article does the math and concludes that, for example, sending an amount of data that would cost $1 from your ISP would cost over $61 million if you were to send it over SMS. Why has the cost of bandwidth, infrastructure, and technology in general plummeted while the price of SMS messages have risen so egregiously? How can carriers continue to justify the high cost of their apparent super-premium data transmission?"
Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Informative)
Next up on Slashdot: Why do cars cost so much?
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Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Funny)
Dumb kids. (Score:3, Funny)
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Not that I should talk, having used VNC from my phone to start a remote backup while driving (shh!). I was at a red light at the time...
Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Funny)
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I believe (from the UK experience) that both indicators and mirrors are optional extras on German cars, as they never, ever indicate even when pulling out 3" from my front bumper :)
Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Insightful)
What?!!!! I want what you're smoking. I can attest to the pathetic driving capabilities of people from Philadelphia. Forget about stopping at a stop sign when there's oncoming traffic. Red light? Sure, we can fit five more cars through as the opposing traffic advances.
Merging traffic? Naw, you don't need to merge. Just stick your nose in. If the guy hits you, keep driving.
and required response time may not leave time for signaling or other kinds of politeness.
The only excuse for not using your turn signal is in an emergency situation or if you are the only car on the road at 2 AM. Other than that, turn signals should always be used.
And yes, I do use my turn signal every single time no matter where I'm at.
Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I'm concerned, signalling is the easiest thing you can do to avoid accidents. Accidents are caused by something unexpected happening. If you telegraph your intentions, others know what you're doing, and have more time to react to you.
Its not like you have to reach anywhere. stick your finger out and flip it up or down. pretty easy.
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Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean that I am going to have to stop talking back to my Sat Nav in a vain attempt to find out exactly what language Ken understands?
Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd love to see a study that compared cell phone talking to having a conversation with a passenger and having your kids in the car. With luck we can get having multiple car occupants banned as a safety hazard. After that food, anything that can be read, the radio, etc... There's just no end to what we can ban!
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Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, talking on a cell-phone with handsfree is more distracting than talking to a real live person sitting in the seat next to you. The same thing can be said for pedestrians using their phones (or handsfree) in traffic. The reason is that the people you are talking to aren't seeing the same thing as you do, so they don't know when you are experiencing a situation that needs your attention. If somebody is sitting right next to you while you are coming up to a crossing or anything remotely dangerous, there will normally be a pause in the conversation untill the situation is resolved. Not so with cell-phones.
I've noticed this phenomenon myself, when I'm driving my mentally retarded brother. He can't really talk, but is fond of attention, and typically says a lot of "hi" and "hello" and other things to grab your attention. Since he has absolutely no understanding about what goes on in traffic, his attention-grabbing often comes at unfortunate times, and I have to admit that this has caused some potentially dangerous situations. Naturally, I'm more careful when driving him now. I'll bet most parents have similar experiences.
My cell-phone usage while driving is mostly related to professional activities with people who know I'm driving, so I have no problem with telling them that I'm coming up to an intersection or something, and they have no problem waiting. On the other hand, I can easily see that other types of conversation can be a lot more dangerous. I try to avoid those while driving, but unfortunately, it's not always easy to pull over, especially in dense traffic where you need it the most.
P _ R N D 2 1 (Score:3, Insightful)
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If you're holding a phone, driving becomes more erratic as you're trying to steer and change gear with one hand.
This is another cultural difference. In the United States, most cars and light trucks have an automatic transmission,
and most roads are straight too, so bends are generally 90 degrees or close.
and minor gear changes are done with the right foot. The only gear changes that need a hand are park, reverse, neutral (or "automatic car wash gear"), and drive, and these are done with the brake pedal firmly pressed.
Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except with a hands free, you have both hands available, so you can accurately control the car and safely respond to safety issues. If you're holding a phone, driving becomes more erratic as you're trying to steer and change gear with one hand.
The problem with using a phone while driving is not one of physical control, but one of attention. Which is why people with only one arm, or other physical disabilities, are allowed to drive.
Re:Adam Smith sez... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wish it was the same in the UK (Score:5, Funny)
And then on the intercity trips there is always someone next to you that obviously uses his phone for business but has that really loud ringtone of Abba singing "Waterloo". He always puts his phone back in his pocket after each call and then takes 20 seconds to get it out again when he's called two minutes later.
Re:I wish it was the same in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
a. Abba's "Waterloo" is more work appropriate than, say, Johnny Paycheck doing "Take this job and shove it" or Rage Against the Machine's "Killing (In the Name Of)".
b. If they leave it out, someone will grab it and jump off the train when it gets to the station.
Next?
hidden words... (Score:5, Funny)
You never know how many hidden words are in a conversation like that.
Translation: "Honey, I know you've been seeing somebody, but I don't want to know about it. Please get him out of our bed---MY BED---before I get home."
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"
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Re:But WHY??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But WHY??? (Score:5, Informative)
It's less intrusive to the recipient than a call. It's not demanding immediate attention, it doesn't make them stop what they're doing, it can be replied to at their convenience or not at all.
It's perfect for sending information that you would otherwise have to find a pen and paper and write down, which aren't always immediately to hand.
It's less annoying to people around you, if you're in a public space.
Sometimes you don't want to have a full conversation on the phone with somebody - sometimes you just want to let them know something, or ask something, that's not important enough to go through the ritual of interrupting whatever they're doing with a call, making small talk, etc etc.
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Re:Adam Smith sez...Hookers should be free. (Score:5, Funny)
Bit a cologne... A blazer... Listenin' a bit more than talkin'. Goes a long way, mate. Sometimes into the next day!
Yer pal, Alfie.
Article text in lieu of mirror. (Score:5, Interesting)
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: $61,356,851.20
Phew! THAT is premium data! It's no wonder that SMS texting alone is a 100 Billion dollar a year industry!
How big is that? Take all of hollywood movie box office revenues worldwide. Add all of the global music industry revenues. And add all of videogaming revenues around the world. Even all those three together, we don't reach 100 billion.
Let's even go more premium - how much would it cost to hand deliver data?
The U.S. Postal service is currently cha
Re:Article text in lieu of mirror. (Score:5, Insightful)
With your ISP you have a direct medium (usually cable) capable of high-speeds (in this case, even 1mbps is high speed). And data overhead is less than 50% (IP header compared to 140 characters of data) on a pre-established link.
With your cell, you have a shared medium (air) with a limited number of frequency bands. The overhead is not only the extra data transfered, but also (like a phone conversation) it has a separate line negociated to transfer.
If you would have smaller prices on SMS (let's say 10 times smaller), more and more users would use it. This would increase the providers load, and even if they could handle it, some cells could be limited by their bandwidth which is regulated by the FCC. This would increase the transmission times and even affect regular communications, which means more angry calls to tech support.
So providers probably justify it as a "crowd control" (something like use it only if you really have to).
Im Romania at least one of the ISPs had a 1st 3 seconds not charged. Needless to say, the consumers started making 1-word calls (call, say 1 word and hang up, then do the same for each other word). I've heard about 1000-page detailed phone bills which were less than 10$. After the 1st year, they cancelled it on ALL contracts, not just the new ones. I don't have to say how it was during phone "rush hour" when you wanted to make a regular call.
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How can they justify the cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
When SMS was introduced at the beginning of the 90ies in Europe, it was basicly free. There were SMS gateways all over the Internet. But then the carriers were recognizing the marketing potential of SMS, and slowly the prices per single message were rising until they reached 49 ct (in Germany at the end of the 90ies). Only when parents were stunned by the SMS cost of their children, protests started to mount, and then the diverse regulation offices in the different countries were trying to limit SMS prices, so there were actual plans which included for example 1000 short messages per month.
SMS is a prime example for the difference between price and cost of a product. The cost is nearly zero, but the pricing is expensive.
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Now, there are minutes included as well, but that still doesn't begin to compare.
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Re:It's easy... (Score:5, Informative)
I never said that GSM cost is zero. I said that the cost of SMS within GSM is zero, because SMS is just a part of GSM (its stderr channel). So if you deploy a huge GSM network to work as a provider of mobile voice services, you get the SMS service for free. When GSM first was deployed it was never thought to have SMS as a separate service. Thus the first huge SMS networks were paid for by voice users who weren't even using SMS. Then the providers which already had a complete SMS infrastructure in place saw that the usage of SMS started to grow and they could just print money by increasing the SMS prices.
When GSM was introduced in the U.S., the SMS facility was already been known to the providers as a big cash cow, and the calculations were already taking that in account.
But still the cost to send an short message is much lower than the cost to send a phone conversation with about the same price. Here in Austria the charge for 1 min of mobile phone conversation is often 1 ct (up to 5 ct/min for prepaid plans). So for the cost of a single short message (19 ct) I can have a conversation for about 19 minutes. Which one will be more expensive to transmit for the provider?
Re:It's easy... (Score:5, Informative)
Moderation (Score:2)
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*This is my non-techie understanding. Somebody with GSM background can elaborate with the
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Correct - SMS messages are sent over the SS7 network, rather than the circuit switched network used to carry voice.
That said, I have no idea what network packet switched IP data is sent over (GPRS, etc.) - are the operators running the IP packets over yet another network infrastructure, or shoving them over the existing SS7 network (with possibly upgraded links). In the long run, t
How can you justify still using SMS? (Score:5, Informative)
T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
Just buy the cheapest data-plan and it's still better if you're a heavy user.
Re:How can you justify still using SMS? (Score:5, Informative)
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achilies heel of the iPhone (Score:2)
Seth
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While that's useful to know, you have to know what provider your contacts are using rather than just knowing their phone number. If your friends change providers (this happens more than you'd expect, especially since number portability became possible a few years back), you have to keep track of that. Even then, when the message sent through the gateway always comes from the same phone number. Depending on how your phone shows incoming messages, it m
meh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:meh (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have to justify anything. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a market economy with lots of morons as customers. As long as they find enough morons to pay their super-inflated prices, they don't have to justify anything. And if they don't find them, they just have to justify why they're not making profit in front of their shareholders.
I've quit sending text messages years ago.
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Let me put things a different way: When I pay a buddy to help me fix my car, that doesn't make me a moron. I set a price for his assistance, and he agrees to it. Could I learn how to fix my car myself? Sure. That would be a major time investment, though, and I'm willing to trade
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The fact that people apparently send hundreds or thousands of text messages per month, at completely ridiculous prices, with an information content close to that of white noise, hints at them being morons. Or just bad at adding up numbers.
When I pay a buddy to help me fix my car, that doesn't make me a moron.
However, when you pay your buddy more to fix your car than a completely new car would cost at the dealership down the
That's what happens without net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
Cellular air links don't have "net neutrality". The pricing for voice, web browsing, SMS, video, and non-Web data connections is totally different. That's what it's like without net neutrality.
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You mean, scarce resources are allocated according to demand? The horror!
Even more rediculous.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if the postal service did that: I have to pay to mail you a letter, and then you have to pay to receive it. Better yet, you have no choice but to receive it and the postal service will bill you for it. Imagine all that spam you get in your mailbox costing 10c each. This is how SMS is charged on most US carriers.
With the ludicrous fees associated with SMS (dollars per byte), if I pay several cents for a 160 character message it ought to get delivered without charges on the other end (including that persons bundled SMS "allowance").
Not Sprint as far as I can tell (Score:3, Insightful)
I just checked my family plan with Sprint (though I doubt it's different from a individual plan) where I know my wife text messaged me yesterday (she sent, I received and replied). On her phone it shows one text message used (not two if the receipt of my response were to count). Mine account shows 18 messages used (I have no data plan, so these are 10c apiece), but I know I've received more messages within the last month and that 18 reflects only the ones I've sent.
I don't know where people get the notio
Justification (Score:2, Troll)
How can Microsoft justify the high-cost of vista premium when all you get is a DVD that cost less than $0.25 to produce?
How can phone companies charge more for international telephone calls than they do for international data transmission, like Skype, which transmits the same audio?
How can Apple justify factory macbook upgrades which cost more than doing the same upgrades yourself?
How can air lines and trai
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- Because it actually cost Microsoft money to make the contents of that DVD
How can phone companies charge more for international telephone calls than they do for international data transmission, like Skype, which transmits the same audio?
- Because it cost them money to use the international trunks/satellite links
How can Apple justify factory macbook upgrades which cost more than doing the
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How can carriers continue to justify the high cost of their apparent super-premium data transmission?"
How can Microsoft justify the high-cost of vista premium when all you get is a DVD that cost less than $0.25 to produce?
They can't, which is why a large number of users run pirated copies, and an increasing number are looking towards free alternatives like linux.
How can phone companies charge more for international telephone calls than they do for international data transmission, like Skype, which transmits the same audio?
They can't, people who know about the cheaper alternatives tend to use them, i haven't made an international call direct from my phone for years.
How can Apple justify factory macbook upgrades which cost more than doing the same upgrades yourself?
They don't, very few people buy bare upgrades direct from apple, some buy them from an apple store because they perform the physical installation, and some people buy new machines with upgrades already installed for the
Bling and Spinning Tires (Score:3, Interesting)
I always knew SMS was a scam. 160 characters per message and I was getting 25 gratis? WTF? Were they communicating these messages with 300 baud modems over phone lines? I was instantly aware there was an extreme difference in the actual overhead of sending the message and the price point being set for the market. I did not understand the technology that much, but nobody could make me believe the cost of broadcasting a small message was that high. They do OTA programming all the time. The signal cannot take that much of the bandwidth on the cell tower. It would have to be equivalent to a 1 second conversation maximum, and since it is more like a UDP packet than a TCP packet, there would be less communications "overhead" to send it. Maybe I am wrong, I don't know if a cellphone sends an ACK type packet when it receives an SMS. Anyways, the technical aspect of it could not make me believe it cost that much.
What made it far far worse as well was that early on, some systems like Exchange Server would use SMS as part of their delivery system. Try getting nailed for an SMS message for every 15 minutes for the whole day. Wheeeee. The SMS cost alone made enterprise email exchange on smartphones or pda phones cost prohibitive. Hence part of the real reason why that technology has moved to Direct Push and uses the WAP gateways instead. The other reason, IMO, is that Direct Push does not depend if your on the phone or not. You spend 30 minutes on your phone without it and email/contact/task synchronization stops during that time period.
Please DON'T get me started on SMS messages that cost the person 1$ just to send them. American Idol? Deal or No Deal? Mofo Puhleeeze. The sheeples wonder why they are being charged 45$ at the end of the month in just extra charges.
So that's what it really boils down too, sheer idiocy on the part of a lot of consumers... and many of them tend to be of the younger "hipper" generation that coincidentally does not pay their bills.
In any case, its all over now. Verizon has started offering unlimited texting plans with all types of messages included, not just SMS. Included gratis in just about any voice plan. Recently switched 6 lines over to it and saved 30$ doing it. So if Verizon is doing it, and they are the WORST at plans, then everybody else must be doing it already.
I call shenangians (Score:2, Interesting)
Given that people in the UK send, in total, about 50 billion SMS per year, and pay approximately 12 cents per message (we'll forget the freebies, let's go really conservative to see how silly the summary of the article is), for about a total market of $6bn. So, if $61m of charged SMSes cost $1 to deliver.. $6bn / $61m = $98. So.. the cost, to the providers,
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Two reasons (Score:2)
2. The Telcos (like many other corporations) are thieving bastards.
Funny thing is, most of the public still wouldn't do anything about this even if they knew. They accept the bills that they get and the roaming costs and the data costs - irrespective of how much they are actually worth.
I wish someone would explain to me why roaming data (browsing internet while overseas) costs an extortionate amount more than when browsing it locally (especially when you are bein
data over sms WTF? (Score:2)
has to be a shoe in for the most retarded comparison of the year?
yes teleco's are gouging us on everything not just sms, hence why i only have a prepaid mobile i hardly use and my home phone is VOIP. my annual telephone bill/internet/mobile expenses are under $1200.
because they can (Score:2)
How can carriers continue to justify the high cost of their apparent super-premium data transmission?
It really is that simple: Because they can.
People are still using SMS, even though in many cases, actually calling by phone would be cheaper and more convenient. I'm not talking about the "I'll arrive at 11:20" message, I'm talking about the actual SMS "chats" that lots of young people engage in. 10, 20 SMS go back and forth easily. Maybe I'm getting old, but I simply don't understand why they don't simply call each other. It'd be faster and cheaper.
I know! (Score:5, Informative)
I made a paper for the univeristy some years ago. The marginal cost of a SMS is 0.
They do have a little cost/opportunity. As a matter of fact SMS messages are sent on the control channel. Initially SMS were implemented in the GSM standard as a control system, just like the ICMP protocol of the IP stack. Then NOKIA though to implement a actual instant message function using SMS. The Contol channel is the channel that your mobile listens to in order to receive calls. So for receiving a SMS a control signal is sent. Since bandwidht is somehow limited on these channels it could happen that in a situation of massive usage of texting the control channel gets saturated and normal voice protocol initiation is disrupted. To prevent this carriers nowadays apply a kind of QoS delaying SMSs until there is no risk of congestion. So we can state that the marginal cost is 0 and the cost/opportunity is also 0
Another story is for the MMSs. Their cost/opportunity is even lower since they run almost enterely on GPRS thus using most bandwidht on normal data channels. Thus a MMS with pictures sounds and maybe video SHOULD cost less than a SMS.
So you wonder, why do I pay so much for a SMS or a MMS or even a Call: after the debts for the initial hardware infrastructure have been paid by the carrier you are still paying because of market segmentation (You won't change the carrier on the fly) and a little monopoly (Almost impossible to start a new carrier from 0).
I hope ou liked the summary!
Raise the price of SMS! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's great isn't it? It costs money to receive spam. If the cost of sending SMS is lowered, I'll start receiving more SMS spam.
Today I receive an occasional spam message via SMS, probably because it's so expensive. If they lower the price to 1 cent, I'm sure I'll start receiving thousands of such messages every day, rendering mobile phones as useless as e-mail has already become, and bankrupting me in the process through the fee for receiving the messages.
If it were up to me, SMS would cost nothing to receive, and $100,00 to send.
some convenient fallacies here (Score:5, Insightful)
- Also, the author takes an average of 80 characters for the cost of SMS and compares them with the max number of words/characters you can send via US mail. An unfair comparison.
All in all, all fallacies skew the numbers towards the point that the author is trying to make, which is quite unethical. It is also stupid because a fair comparison would totally support his point, just with slightly less astounding numbers.Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
apples and oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
The article promises to tell us about the "true cost of SMS" but never actually does this.
Cellular networks are very different than the data networks. One big difference is that while our data networks are connectionless, the focus of cellular networks is on connections. Operators must balance the use of SMS messages with the normal call traffic. Perhaps SMS use is disrupting normal call traffic and the operators are using the free market to curb SMS volume?
Modern cellular protocols are reducing the connection-centricity of the networks and the price of text messages will likely come down, but at that point the messages will probably be run over 3G instead of the SMS mechanism.
SMS Scene in India (Score:3, Informative)
The Real Answer: They Don't Want You To (Score:5, Insightful)
Having people paying for five messages one month, then fifty the next, then ten the next is lousy for their bookkeeping. They don't like the unreliability. But if you're giving them $10 every month instead, their accountants are able to sleep at night.
Just for comparision (Score:4, Interesting)
Iridium (yes, they are still around): $1.50/minute (prices vary). This buys you a 1200 bps link (they claim 2400 bps, but your actual throughput is closer to 1200). This means to send a megabyte of data would cost you (1048576 / 1200 / 60 * 1.5 == $21.85). According to the article a megabyte of SMS would cost you $1,497.97. Iridium was generally considered to be grossly expensive when it came out.
Now lets compare against a real (even more expensive) satellite connection. Inmarsat BGAN charges by the megabyte, a common plan is $7 for each modem/satellite hop, so in the worst case scenario you're sending modem to modem for $14/meg.
Re:Offer and demand (Score:5, Informative)
And have you ever wondered how is it possible that simple text messages can jam the system every New Year? Sending 10 byte sms 1000000 times isn't equal to sending 10x1000000 bytes of data using data transfer. Every time you send an sms, the system needs to open a connection and it consumes a lot more resources.
A LOT of air on the prices (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC it had cost about a million Euro (most of which was the price of SW) and just sits there, generating a revenue of roughly a million Euro per day. Maintenance costs: almost zero. Network load: almost zero, because messages are transmitted only in pauses between calls. Modulo New Year, nationwide televoting or football world cup, of course, where the assumption of a few messages between a few calls is no longer valid.
Re:A LOT of air on the prices (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless the phone can do SMS over GPRS, each SMS message eats signalling capacity and travels along an SS7 link. After that it once again eats signalling capacity and competes with the rest of the signalling traffic for a place in the sun on the beacon channel. This is probably the most expensive way to encapsulate data known to man. You use mostly serial links, reliable transfer everywhere, transaction safe forwarding on every step and so on. It is not surprising that it is hideously expensive. When the protocol was designed nobody had the slightest idea how popular it will be and now it is a commodity so everyone is afraid to break it while trying to optimise it.
So the hideous price of GSM SMS is here to stay until we switch to 3G.
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Re:A LOT of air on the prices (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A LOT of air on the prices (Score:4, Funny)
Heh, I like this concept. Perhaps the wireless companies-to the dissatisfaction of English teachers everywhere-are also subversively encouraging the use of SMS lingo. For example, "r u going to the mall 2night" is compressed to 82% of the original size of "are you going to the mall tonight". Those bastards will do anything to make a buck!
Re:A LOT of air on the prices (Score:5, Funny)
It is even easier where I live. I just type "pub 15" and receiver immediately understands that it means a hectic beer drinking festival at the pub starting 15 minutes from now, put on your clothes and get your ass to the pub. So the compression rate is enormous! It also helps that there is only one pub in the town...
Air interface bottleneck plus infrastructure costs (Score:5, Informative)
The reason that the real cost is actually quite high is the fact that the GSM air interface is miniscule compared to the demands of the all the people using the system in each cell.
If an SMS were free, the air interface would get clogged up.
So it's quite sensible to economize the use of the interface using price to depress demand.
From memory (from my work with Detecon/D-1 in Bonn, Germany) in 1991/92, the SMS data goes over something called an SDCCH channel, which uses 1/8 of the bandwidth of a normal 13 kbit/sec voice channel (or half-rate 6.5 kbit/sec). The SDCCH channel is devoted to one user for a few seconds during the transaction. Potentially you can have 64 SDCCH channels open on a single physical frequency (using TDMA) at one time. But there are also bottlenecks in the signalling system (control channels).
Additionally you require the whole infrastructure for storing and delivering the SMSes. Store-and-forward has complexities that connection-oriented traffic does not.
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Re:Offer and demand (Score:4, Insightful)
> covered (service providers don't get the system for free).
> Then there is support you need to provide for customers. And billing.
The infrastructure is exactly the same as that used for voice calls.
In building the voice network, they DO get the SMS facility for free (or very nearly so).
There is pretty much no reason why SMS and for that matter, data charges are so high. Even if they only charged quarter of what they do now for texts, they would still make a healthy profit on each one. People would probably also write more often and not stick to the 160 character message size so much so they might make a similar amount of money anyway.
Re:Offer and demand (Score:4, Informative)
GSM Voice is 9.6Kb per sec. A minute of voice is 72KB of data, compared with 160 characters which shouldn't be much more than ~30bytes, or ~2500 times less data than a minute of voice data. Yet a minute of voice communication is usually cheaper than sending a SMS, at least with European carriers.
Any more suggestions?
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And have you ever wondered how is it possible that simple text messages can jam the system every New Year?
Yes, I have, so I read up on it a few weeks ago. Apparently, on GSM networks, at least, SMS messages are sent on control channels, not on channels used for voice calls, nor on channels dedicated for SMS traffic. There's apparently very limited bandwidth on these control channels, which are also used to *set up* voice calls, so when SMS traffic peaks, not only are you unable to send texts, but you're unable to make or receive new calls. Appalling that the system is designed so poorly. I don't recall whe
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I'm sure if I was in environments where I ne
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I usually find voicemail much less convenient, at least to receive it. Partly this is the interface; I get notified that someone's left a message via an SMS. So first I need to read the SMS to see I have a voice message. Then I need to call up my voice mail service and listen to the robot woman tell me when the call was missed (which I usually already know because my phone previously notified me that I missed a call). Then I have to listen to the message, and if there's anything important in it I normally n
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Re:As the four other posters... (Score:5, Funny)
Some of us like to live dangerously. On the rare occasions when I get text messages, I read them standing up.
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In noisy environments, or when someone is hard of hearing, SMS is far superior to a voice call. Email could be as good, but just isn't as ubiquitous (usage-wise) on mobile phones.
I've always found voicemail systems frustrating, slow and costly. Many mobile packages charge you for receiving voicemail, whereas (outside the US at least) receiving an SMS is free, so it's a little impolite to leave a voice message as opposed to an SMS. The 'while driving' argument is also out if you live anywhere that bans
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Anyone who's been involved in putting together a tender will tell you that "reasonable profit" is a well understood term, and on most cost plus jobs will be 15%.
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Do you personally know people who do in-depth cost analysis calculations on the profitability of th
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In the Philippines, widely considered the SMS capital of the world, where the three major carriers among themselves handle over a billion messages a day, prices have always been relatively low as well. They have generally been, for as long as I can remember, priced at PhP 1, which is about 2.5 US cents at current exchange rates, also with no charge for incoming messages. The basic rates go even lower when you factor in things like the carriers giving you a certain number of free SMS per month for monthly