The “Break it Down” Blog

(Congratulations, that just cost you $0.20)

The gthing science blog put together a rather eye-opening analysis of just exactly how much SMS costs you and/or how goddamn rich it’s making the phone companies.

Even more offensive than the $8000 per gallon that HP and other vendors charge for black ink, gthing deduces that if you compare the cost of bandwidth over SMS to the cost of bandwidth from your standard ISP, downloading roughly 2500 MP3s will cost you $1 from the ISP, and $15 million over SMS.

He also notes that SMS prices have been all over the map in the last few years, some times $0.05 then $0.10 then $0.15 and now $0.20 from AT&T (that is a charge both ways).

SMS messages are one of the golden-egg-laying gooses of the phone industry much like ATM fees (to get your own money back) net the banking industry more than $20 billion a year (probably more like $40 now). It’s all free money, and until someone tells them they can’t charge it, they will continue to do so.