SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble 410
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Good thing they've got all those teenagers hooked on it.
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If you have the kind of phone that can really take advantage of the high data stuff, you are getting into 7 dollars a month insurance fee's.
etc... etc... etc...
When all you should really have to pay is for phone and data services which SHOULD cost around 50 dollars, but instead costs 70 dollars because of 20 dollars mandatory fees applied.
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Re:Interesting way to look at it (Score:5, Interesting)
You, my friend, have no concept of your expenses and how much you waste. I pay $100 for 4 phones with voice mail and all of the fancy features. I get 1000 minutes a month anywhere in the US and unlimited to any T-mobile phones. They want to charge me $0.15 per message that I receive. I have no control over anyone sening me messages so I, as a customer, am screwed. I don't even want this service and am forced to pay for it anyway. They will not turn it off.
This is highway robbery and is wrong! How do we stop this?
Re:Interesting way to look at it (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure they have a way of putting a block on a particular service -- I've been with Cingular (before the AT&T merge) and Sprint and both of them can block SMS, you just have to call and push the CSR to do it. And if they tell you they can't, ask for next-tier support. If they tell you no, threaten to take the matter up with your state's AG and the FCC. That usually gets a quick response. (If Sprint can do it, and their customer service is quite possibly the worst I've ever encountered, then T-Mobile can do it.)
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I really can't fathom how people can spend $100 a month for a phone service. Surfing the net is what I do at home or at school... not while I'm driving 90 down the interstate.
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You mean a certain amount of free minutes (say 120-300) per month? 'Cause that's the standard in most of Europe as well.
Re:Interesting way to look at it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interesting way to look at it (Score:4, Informative)
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The carriers will cell you data transfer in the form of voice for a somewhat inflated price. They'll sell you data transfer in the form of arbitrary data for another price, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, depending on where you live. Or they'll sell you data transfer in the form of text messages for an insanely inflated price.
The lemonade is reasonably priced, but if you want it in a cup then you're going
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Maybe it is because
Mobile phones are stupidly expensive.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
"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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Overhead (Score:5, Informative)
The cost of using it are very low, but the costs to initially add the feature are very high. Then you add in the fact that usage rates are typically low (only a handful of passengers buy it, only "full-service" airlines install the equipment), it can be hard to make it pay for itself.
Of course, they do add a high margin on top of their projected costs because they can without affecting the demand much, but the fixed costs still dominate (at the moment...data services will be much better integrated in the coming generation of airliners, and we may be moving towards allowing cell phones in flight, too).
SMS is the opposite. They aren't seeing low usage on new, expensive infrastructure. They're seeing high usage on existing, paid-for infrastructure.
The SMS scheme really isn't a very good one. SMS messages get multiplexed into the control channels on the mobile phone network, and it's really a 2nd generation technology. The size of the control channels is fundamentally limited, but each slot is big enough for a text message. So the providers squeeze the SMS into it because it fits and it doesn't require re-engineering their protocols to fit it in the voice channels. This is also why SMS is limited to so few characters: That's what fits in a time-division on the control channel.
Unfortunately, it proved to be a popular service. The limited extra space fills up quickly. In fact, it's theoretically possible to launch a relatively wide-area DDoS attack [smsanalysis.org] by sending only a couple hundred messages per second from zombie clients. To get the best return on their existing capacity, providers raise the price to discourage excessive use.
The puzzling thing in my opinion is that it's taking so long for this service to shift from being side-banded in the 2G scheme to being normal data packets on 3G networks. As that happens, the capacity for text explodes (text is way more compact than voice, pictures, video and other planned 3G content) and the providers can leverage the genuinely low cost of text to undersell their competitor's plans. A pricewar ensues and the consumers win.
But it hasn't happened yet. My best guess is because the companies realize that the first one to make a substantial move in this direction will only enjoy success for a short time before the others all catch up. Then the competitive advantage is gone and profits have dropped close to zero.
No, I haven't sourced much of this. It's mostly conclusions from discussions with friends who work in the mobile industry. Feel free to correct the parts I got wrong.
cost of SMS? it's what people will pay (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as I know the cost of SMS hasn't risen. It jus hasn't fallen.
When SMS started (early 90's - anyone?) the cost was, IIRC, 10p each. Now it's 5p. The starting price was a guess and seems to have more-or-less stuck. Obviously if people weren't willing to use the service the price would've been reduced. Since people are willing to pay 5p per message, there's no reason (how do you spell CARTEL, by the way?) for any of the carriers to reduce it.
What they have done instead is to bundle "free" texts in with your monthly contracts - which is nice for the pay-monthly grown-ups, who don't use them, but no use at all for the PAYG kiddies who are the main text users.
Now that's marketing!
Real Cost? (Score:2, Insightful)
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ET (Score:5, Funny)
Markup (Score:5, Insightful)
This just makes it a stellar ripoff. When will it ever change?
Double dipping (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Double dipping (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Double dipping (Score:5, Funny)
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Ditto for most Lain American countries. SMS aren't exactly cheap down here, but receiving is always free of charge.
Re:Double dipping (Score:5, Interesting)
Have a day when everyone in the country sends an SMS to their senator and their representative and see how long the practice is allowed to stand when every politician has mobile phone bills in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Re:Double dipping (Score:4, Informative)
Nah; they probably haven't been "colluding" in any legal sense. They can probably show in court that they haven't gotten together to arrange prices.
The term you're looking for is "gentlemen's agreement", which has a long history in the business world, and is the standard way of getting around any such government regulation. Now with the Internet, it's easier than ever for companies to align policies and prices without doing any direct communication. Each company just keeps track of its competitors' policies and prices, and makes sure that their own are roughly the same. They're also careful to maintain slight variations, as "proof" that there's no collusion.
This can be broken in two ways. One is for a company to suddenly introduce a much better deal with customers. This doesn't happen often, because there are usually strong barriers to entry. This means that the change would have to be done by one of the existing companies, and their management has the sense to not do that. This has happened in the past, when a large outside company with sufficient funds was able to break into a market. A major example recently was the entry of Japanese auto companies into the American market back in the 1960s and 1970s.
The other way to break a gentlemen's agreement is via government action. We had a major telecom example of this in the US in the 1970s, when the government invalidated the companies' contract terms forbidding "foreign attachments". Suddenly things like modems and phones with new features became possible, and we had an explosion of new products that the phone companies had managed to block for the previous century.
But it's rather rare for government regulators to make such enabling changes. This is the current situation with cell phones, where there appears to be regulation and competition, but the regulative agencies are pretty much ruled by the companies. So gentlemen's agreements are the way things are organized, and the companies can all say "Sign our contract or go without entirely". They know that their competitors' contracts differ only trivially, the regulators are mostly there to prevent entry of new competitors, and there's no way for mere customers to do anything about it.
SMS was initially free (Score:4, Informative)
Ironically the price of an SMS is dropping and it actually costs somebody who 'bulk' buys 10000 messages around about 1.5p .
My concern is that it is getting so cheap, that I've already started receiving spam SMS.
As an aside, some companies now provide a SIM card hosting service. So if you can get the right package from an Operator (e.g. unlimited SMS messages) there is nothing to stop you spamming the world.
Thankfully 'clicking' on any links is not so simple and most people realise clicking actually costs them money.
5p per message isn't that bad (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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[Sigh...] Not again... (Score:2, Interesting)
30/5 = $6 for unlimited texting.
Ok, that doesn't include the cost of the voice part of the plan that you obviously need to have.
I don't know the maximum size of a MMS, but it's under a MB, around 700k I think. That'll move data around pretty quick-like, too.
Next...
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There are two reasons why that's not a good solution:
old chatter (Score:2, Interesting)
Total Bullshit from the very beginning (Score:5, Informative)
So when you factor in these novelty SMS messages, the ratio becomes much worse.
I have never seen any hard data on the actual costs of sending a SMS message across GSM/CDMA cell towers, but I expect that the profit margins on a SMS message make Monster look positively razor thin with it's own margins.
The reason why anyone with a brain (even a damaged/inebriated/mutated one) can see how ridiculous the price points on SMS is pretty simple.
Take a mid-range T-Mobile calling plan. Say the individual 1000 minutes for 49.99$. 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.
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SMS is for most people instant messaging - just like E-mail has become. Yes this is not what was intended, but this is what consumers expect. If a telecom doesn't deliver SMS within a very small timeframe people will find a new carrier.
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SMS is expected to arrive instantly these days. Here in Denmark SMS can cost down to 1 øre while just making a call is 25 øre, so people have begun using SMS as communication instead of calls - and thus expect it to be instant.
unlimited plan? (Score:2)
For the record, I hate text messages except for those occasional times when they make sense (finding someone at a loud concert, e.g.). Paying an outrageous rate both inbound and outbound for 140 b
Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
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Just goes to show that prices and cost has very little to do with each other in this market.
This just in... (Score:3, Insightful)
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We're climbing there, but who is to say that the rising cost of oil won't proportionally increase the cost of ink?
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Liquid Nitrogen cheaper than beer (Score:2)
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The opposite is true in Japan (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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I think my head just exploded (Score:3, Insightful)
My computing time is 4x more valuable analyzing Seti@home data as opposed to loading this article up on
Japan text messaging (Score:2, Informative)
Silly logic - SMS for data? (Score:2)
"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 per MB...
That is, if you try to use SMSes to send data. Which you wouldn't. You'd set up a GPRS/3G session, and do it that way. And at (say) £3/MB, it suddenly seems a little more normal.
Bit of a troll, here, methinks.
That isn't to say that they're still many many many times more expensive than the cost of an SMS to the operator. But that's market forces for you. People pay that much, therefore it's "worth" that much.
Yeah, but Hubble is only one station (Score:3, Insightful)
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I've disabled text messaging (Score:2)
So is this the time to bring up ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So is this the time to bring up ... (Score:5, Funny)
Hubble just can't compete (Score:2)
So what's your point? (Score:2)
And the point is? (Score:2)
SMS in India is way cheaper then! (Score:2)
Lameness of it all (Score:3, Interesting)
My Wife has Cricket, which has unlimited calling and unlimited texting - but doesn't allow her to send emails. Well, it says she can't, and complains each time she does ("Cricket does not support this activity at this time"), but usually it goes through. I think there is a work-around by sending an MMS (?) message and that allowed emailing, but still complains.
It's all lame. If we're paying for what accounts for unlimited data, just give us unlimited data.
Re:Math is HARD (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Math is HARD (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Math is HARD (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Math is HARD (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Math is HARD (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Math is HARD (Score:5, Funny)
Hell yes! Month day and year, too.
Re:Math is HARD (Score:5, Funny)
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I went to a Catholic University, you insensitive clod!
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Re:Math is HARD (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you have a URL for an article that states that the SMS network is so overwhelmed with text messages that all non-unlimited (limited) customers must subsidize their unlimited brethren at an incredible mark-up?
'Cause, really, I think it makes far more sense that carriers abuse their captive audience with outrageous pricing of extremely inexpensive commodity SMS service. But I've been wrong before.
Cheers,
-l
Re:Math is HARD (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Math is HARD (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Math is HARD (Score:5, Insightful)
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mine are... I like to get my moneys worth.
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Re:Math is HARD (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Math is HARD, idiocy comes natural (Score:5, Interesting)
Somebody is loopy! SMS may be charged a lot for and well these charges are high but the cost of SMS is exactly a grand total of NOTHING.
I know you are probably asking how and that is quite simple. Your cell phone transmits a 256 byte message very regularly to the receiving tower and it transmits a corresponding message back to you regularly. This is how your cell phone connects to the network and how they know you are able to receive calls etc. This message has 186 bytes of blank space in it .... unless .... you put an SMS message out or they transmit one to you. SMS rides in this carrier byte packet. As such it costs the network exactly nothing and uses no bandwidth that isn't already in use even if nobody ever sent an SMS message.
So this gets really nice for the company. They bill astronomically for a "Free Good" and we stupidly allow them to bill us for this. SMS should be 100% free with cell phone service. Even the message handling costs are insignificant world wide for this and nobody should ever be billed for it. Of course we stupidly allow them to sell it and we of course buy it stupidly.
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Let me tell you, the actual costs of sending SMS is peanuts. In 2001 it was approximately 0.1p per message. Its actually much cheaper now. This includes cost of electricity, processor power, and all other associated costs.
A poster b
Re:Other costs? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:and the infrastructure cost doesn't matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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The towers were there long before anybody thought of SMS.
"How much did it cost to deploy and manage a network capable of servicing text messages?"
Small, best-effort text messages? Oh, I'd wager it's at least an order of magnitude less than the cost of switched networks capable of real-time voice transmission.
"Both relied on much existing infrastructure but I have to wonder, whats the preoccupati