The “Break it Down” Blog

We covered the “True Cost of SMS” a while ago, but data is surfacing again at the absolutely ridiculous rates that SMS demand. Latest estimations put the “true” cost of SMS messages to be roughly 4x that of the most pessimistic rates estimated to be the cost of transmitting data to/from the Hubble Space telescope.

When you consider all the SMS reminders that you can setup now for all of the Google services, your bank, friends and more you see why the phone companies are shitting candy… they are making a goddamn killing off of next to no bandwidth usage.

From the article, a bit more detail of the breakdown:

The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 [$732.95] per MB

Let’s hope with 3G network rolls outs, we’ll start seeing more reasonable generic data rates and not this ridiculous breakdown of data, SMS and phone. It’s all data anyway.