« Australia: training ground for consumer abuse | Main | Whazup, Windows XP? »
May 12, 2008
SMS - the purest form of rip-off
The founder of Vodafone, the late Sir Gerald Whent, is reputed to have described the SMS message as "the purest form of profit ever invented". They cost the networks close to zero to send, because they use the control channel which SMS systems use to listen for traffic (the original idea was not to charge for them at all) and the mathematics are obscene. If you used the total message length you'd be sending a tenth of a kilobyte (.13671875 Kbytes) of data, which means you're paying roughly 1c for every 7 bytes of data or $1,497.97 for a single megabyte.
But the most graphic illustration of the concentrated greed they represent came from a calculation done for the BBC 4 Dispatches show a couple of weeks ago (our ownrapid calculation, which could be wrong, suggests it would cost more than $500,000 to download a show like that via SMS, rather than by Bit Torrent). They got a scientist to work out the real cost of transmitting a megabyte of data back to earth from the Hubble Space Telescope: $174. If the scientists were forced to use SMS, it would cost four times as much. That, however, is at the British SMS rate of 5p per text message. If they were using an Australian network, they'd be paying six times as much. If you could somehow get all your friends into deep space, you'd save a heck of a lot on texting.
Posted by cw at May 12, 2008 06:47 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://bleedingedge.com.au/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1472
Comments
Great article. I agree completely with your statement. It's ridiculous when you calculate the amount the aggregators and cell phone providers are making per bit and byte sent. Absolutely ridiculous.
nate
Posted by: Nate Nead at May 13, 2008 04:01 AM