Anyone who uses SMS messaging on a cell phone knows the horror of running over the messages-per-month limit. Most cell providers charge 20 cents per text over a user’s quota, and it’s easy to rack up serious bills this way.
If you’ve done this more than once, you’ve probably moved to an all-you-can-text plan, which costs between $10-$20, thinking you’ve escaped cell phone billing hell. But according to the New York Times’ Randall Stross, you’re still not making out like a bandit. Instead, cell phone companies are.
Stross writes that SMS messaging uses an existing component of cellular communication, effectively cutting their costs to nearly nothing:
A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”
Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.
That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.
This is why, when cell networks are stressed as they were during Hurricane Ike, wireless companies urge their customers to use text messaging instead of voice calls. It takes a lot fewer resources to push SMS messages to their destinations.
The question thus arises: Is this price gouging? Or simply charging what the market will bear? SMS messaging is not a required service – it’s an option, a luxury of sorts. But try telling that to my 17-year-old daughter, who exchanged 2,660 messages with family and friends in our last billing period, or about 89 a day. For her, SMS and Facebook are the primary ways she communicates with her friends.
Fortunately, we’ve got a family plan for text messaging — $30 for all five of us on the plan. Four of us use it regularly. We like to think we’re getting a good deal, but I think we’re fooling ourselves.
Stross begins his entry with an anecdote about a U.S. Senator’s attempts to get some details from the wireless carriers about their cost structure for SMS services. As you can imagine, they were not as forthcoming as they might have been. Given how much money they’re making on the thumbs of 17-year-old girls, their reticence is not surprising.