Time has an article asking whether we pay too much for SMS. Yeah, we know the answer to this already since Rogers decided to all of a sudden raise the costs of incoming texts ∞% from 0¢ to 15¢. But two things were neat about this article.
The average U.S. mobile teen now sends or receives an average of 2,899 text messages per month, according to Nielsen Mobile.
Holy cow, that’s 100 texts a day on average. I wonder where the 95% percentile people are at?
The other cool thing was that they brought a prof from Waterloo to be an expert witness in front of the US Senate
At those hearings, Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and an expert on mobile computing, presented a detailed analysis of all the expenses that carriers incur in handling SMS messages. He showed that the wireless channels contribute about a tenth of a cent to a carrier’s cost, that accounting charges might be twice that and that other costs basically round to zero because texting requires so little of a mobile network’s infrastructure. Summing up, Keshav found that a text message doesn’t cost providers more than 0.3 cent.
Hmm, Roger’s $5 messaging bundle provides 250 outgoing messages. That means that make a 600% profit on that plan!
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