SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble

paradoxSpirit writes "Physorg has a paper comparing the cost of text messaging versus the cost of getting data from Hubble Space Telescope. From the article: '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 — or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs." "Hubble is by no means a cheap mission — but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!""

Interesting way to look at it

I've often believed (known?) that text messaging is just a last refuge of the cell phone companies to squeeze a little extra money out of their consumers. As it is, on my carrier, I get unlimited calling to people on the same carrier all day, every day. I get unlimited calling to anybody, regardless of carrier, on nights and weekends. I even pay to have unlimited data transfer. But if I send more than number of text messages a month, it adds up substantially.

Good thing they've got all those teenagers hooked on it.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

Right. This is no different than paying $4 for a hot dog at a ball park when you could get the same hot dog at home for $0.25. Yeah it's a ripoff, but you're a captive audience. If you don't like it, wait until you get home.

Mobile phones are stupidly expensive..

and they have these stupid contracts such as "You pay as 15 pounds a month and we'll give you x many text messages free!"

What a stupid offer.. I mean what's next. I pay Microsoft 250 pounds and they give me a free operating system? Who are the kidding here?

When in Thailand I had the best phone contract ever with DTAC, 8 pounds a month, free phone calls any time for as long as I wanted to 5 selected numbers including 500 hours internet usage.

To ask for such a price in the places such as England would get you laughed out the shop.

Re:Mobile phones are stupidly expensive..

these stupid contracts such as "You pay as 15 pounds a month and we'll give you x many text messages free!" What a stupid offer..

It's actually quite clever. By throwing in "freebies", they can take them away at any time. Just like they throw around temporary discounts "sign up for 12 months, and the first 6 months you only pay ..."

The more a company does this, the less likely I am to do business with them. It demonstrates an inherent lack of commitment to the existing customers (who usually don't get the freebies).

is this a dupe--or just inisghtful

nilbog writes
"What's the actual cost of sending SMS messages? This article does the math and concludes that, for example, sending an amount of data that would cost $1 from your ISP would cost over $61 million if you were to send it over SMS. Why has the cost of bandwidth, infrastructure, and technology in general plummeted while the price of SMS messages have risen so egregiously? How can carriers continue to justify the high cost of their apparent super-premium data transmission?"

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/29/0244208&from=rss [slashdot.org]

Re:is this a dupe--or just inisghtful

Lack of competition and cost awareness. Really.

For example, take the data rates while abroad. Do you really think the extra cost of transferring data across the world (you know, like you're doing right now) justified a price that's often tens of dollars per megabyte? Or that in-flight calls [userfriendly.org] really cost that much? They charge what people will pay, simple as that.

ET

No Wonder ET wants to call home

Markup

Everyone knows cellular companies markup text services so high it's ridiculous. I think it's in the range of 4000x higher than data transfer rates. You pay 0.10 for 140bytes for texts, or about 0.15 for 1024bytes in any data transfer service.
This just makes it a stellar ripoff. When will it ever change?

Double dipping

And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent.

Sprint's charging $0.20 each for these now-a-day (unless you have another plan of some sort). It's just the latest ripoff in the mobile phone industry.

Re:Double dipping

That's primarily an issue with American carriers.

In the UK, where I am, & Europe, we pay to send messages, and make phone calls, but to receive either is free.

Re:Double dipping

I don't really care about being charged minutes to receive calls - it seems fair enough, I'm using air time. I can check the caller ID and refuse the call if I don't want to be charged. It hasn't been a big deal.

Getting dinged $0.20 per spam SMS? That's a bit more annoying. There's no way to refuse a text message (on Sprint, at least). And thanks to the email-to-SMS gateway, the spammer doesn't get charged a penny. (I'm noticing that a huge percentage of spam I receive on my regular account is, for some strange reason, under 160 characters.)

It's even more annoying because I have an unlimited data plan - I can send and receive unlimited email from my Gmail account. I can view satellite imagery on Google Maps, which I'm fairly sure involves more data transfer than an SMS. But receive one text message? Boom, $0.20 charge.

Re:Double dipping

And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent.

Only in the US. In the UK (and the rest of Europe, AFAIK) the telcos don't charge you for receiving texts—and even the idea of them doing so is considered absurd.

Re:Double dipping

And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent.

Only in the US. In the UK (and the rest of Europe, AFAIK) the telcos don't charge you for receiving texts--and even the idea of them doing so is considered absurd.

Oh, believe me, we in the US consider it absurd too. But when every carrier available to you does it, it doesn't bleedin' matter what we think, does it?

5p per message isn't that bad

In the Netherlands 0.25 euro (16p or $0.38) per message is quite common. For that price I can call 1.67 minutes.

But that doesn't matter for me. I don't use text messages for the simple reason that I don't think it's worth the price.

Total Bullshit from the very beginning

and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p

That is an assumption and most likely pretty conservative. There are plenty of SMS text messages sent/received by complete idiots that spend 99c per message. I am not attempting to troll here either. Those people are COMPLETE IDIOTS to spend that kind of money on a simple text message. I am always reminded of the saying, "A fool and his money are soon parted".

So when you factor in these novelty SMS messages, the ratio becomes much worse.

I have never seen any hard data on the actual costs of sending a SMS message across GSM/CDMA cell towers, but I expect that the profit margins on a SMS message make Monster look positively razor thin with it's own margins.

The reason why anyone with a brain (even a damaged/inebriated/mutated one) can see how ridiculous the price points on SMS is pretty simple.

Take a mid-range T-Mobile calling plan. Say the individual 1000 minutes for 49.99$. That is 4.9c per MINUTE of a telephone conversation.

Until quite recently, a SMS text message plan did not have unlimited messages. They do have this now for 14.99$ at T-Mobile. The plan right below that? 9.99$ a month for 1000 messages. Yep, that is 1c per text message. I had always remembered plans that were 250 messages for 4.99$ at various places, which is 1.9c per text message.

So does anyone really beleive that a SMS text message can cost 20-25% as much as a minute of a cellphone call?

I certainly didn't think so. Raise your hands if you think that is right. Anyone? Anyone at all?

SMS was ALWAYS their little cash machine. Most people never paid attention to it, or considered the real costs involved and I would bet 4-5 digit profit margins at a minimum for the past decade.

The opposite is true in Japan

From what I've heard, the opposite is true in Japan: their voice plans are expensive compared to ours, whereas unlimited text messages are the norm. This makes more sense because voice is clearly the more bandwidth hungry form of communication.

I'm told that the driving factor behind this unlimited texting is that it is considered very rude to talk on your phone in public/the subway/etc. Hence texting as the dominant type of communication. Can anyone confirm/correct me on this?

Re:Math is HARD

160 characters * (7 bits/character) * (1 byte/8 bits) = 140 bytes

Re:Math is HARD

TFA is talking about the transfer of data, not how many little bits are actually involved in the transaction. Headers and transmission overhead are not data. If you downloaded a CD ISO, you would not say that you downloaded 946MB and include "overhead" in your figure. Did you include your name and the class number in the word count for your papers in college?

Re:Math is HARD

> Did you include your name and the class number in the word count for your papers in college?

Hell yes! Month day and year, too.

Re:Math is HARD

"On this most glorious Twelfth Day of May, Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight"

Re:Math is HARD

First off, they're kinda right for the wrong reasons.

The "delivered" portion of the short message service (SMS) message is 140 characters and they do combine the unused 8th bits to yield 160 7 bit ascii characters per message. I don't know how much of the hubble's overhead was included in the article's 8.85 GBP per megabyte.

While greed is always a factor with big corporations, many of the charges put in place have primary purpose of keeping capacity in check. While the marketing folk at big telecomm corporations love the word "unlimited" it creates nightmares for the engineering folk who find that their SS7 network completely congested. They investitage and find that while it was designed to carry 30 SMSs per day for the 30 million subscribers for which it was scaled is now at it's limit because of an open source project that breaks up TCP packets and transmits them over SMS and allows people to download pr0n to their restrictive countries over SMS.

My favorite carrier offers unlimited texting for $20 per month. The way his daughters send messages he's getting them at 1/4 cent apiece.

So, slightly cheaper than from the Hubble! Score!

Re:Math is HARD

It doesn't matter, most textmessages are not 160 characters anyway.

Re:So is this the time to bring up ...

I think soon it might be cheaper to drive with non-branded printer ink.

Re:Other costs?

I'm not sure the exact costs that the carriers incure when people send a text message but I do remember this:

After the freeway collapse in Mineapollis last year, the cell companies told people to text rather than call in large emergencies because it uses significantly less resources.

Re:and the infrastructure cost doesn't matter?

because the whole idea that cell towers and the like just sprouted like weeds is appealing but they are costly.

That only sounds insightful. The cell towers in question provide the infrastructure for SMS/VOICE/DATA all at the same time. The cost of the tower is not actually relevant to your argument at all since it applies equally to all the products being provided.

Actually the comparison is bogus because its apple's and oranges. They have nothing in common other than that word "transmit"

Exactly the opposite in fact. Apples/Apples/Apples. Whether or not it is a SMS message, Voice call, or Data connection it is all just digital communications between the cellular handset and the towers. If you were to compare it to the Internet, the cell towers would be your connection and SMS/VOICE/DATA would just be different services communicating on the same foundation of TCP/IP. It's all just packets of data when you get down to it.

How much did it cost to deploy and manage a network capable of servicing text messages?

The best question you have asked so far. I don't know the answer either, but I do KNOW that we can compare that directly with the cost to deploy and manage a network capable of handling digital voice communications.

How much did it cost to deploy the Hubble, let alone a system to manage it?

That question was answered in the article itself by nobody less than NASA themselves. So the data he is using there is accurate.

You are trying to consider the actual costs of a SMS infrastructure. However, you really only need to consider how much more difficult it is to establish a two-way voice communication than send a SMS text message.

In order of difficulty, it starts with a voice conversation being the most difficult, a data session being the 2nd most difficult (I may be wrong here, data could be 1st for all I know), and lastly sending and acknowledging receipt of a SMS message. When you start to think about that ask yourself if a static 160 character SMS message really costs 20-25% of a minute of real time telephone conversation.

That is the real "dirty" truth. Sending a SMS text message only requires a very short transmission of data and a receipt being sent back from the handset. If you were to attempt to compare that "Apple" to the "Orange" that is a 60 second slice of a voice call, you would find that a 60 second voice call is really just about a thousand of those little SMS messages being sent back and forth between the tower and handset. I came up with that number by assuming that a voice call will require at least 2.5KB/s of data for a decent quality connection. Take 2500 bytes and divide that by 140 bytes (from the article) and you get approx. 18 SMS messages per second of voice, which is 1080 SMS messages per minute.

A SMS message is at most 1/1000th of the difficulty of sending and receiving voice data. There is no "separate" cell tower infrastructure that is more complex, and thus more costly, than the voice/data infrastructure. SMS was a tiny little added feature that turned into something else along the way, namely a astronomically high margin product.

I am not even really that mad at them. They found a price point that people were willing to pay for a product that cost them far far less to "produce". I just happened to be one of the people that knew how high their margin really was and decided to not pay them for it. Caveat Emptor.