TXT Messages: The Ripoff They Don't Want You To Know About

Recently, the price of text messages has been at the front of my thoughts, due to the recent glut of mass texted "Merry Christmas" messages from friends (and acquaintances I hadn't heard from in years.) Now, you'd think that in 2008, with an iPhone that has an unlimited data plan... that I'd have no issue with the cost of text messages.

You'd be wrong.

See, by the time Christmas rolled around, I'd already spent my allowance of 250 text messages for the month, which, by the way, are *not* included in the iPhone plan. I'm paying $5/month for the privilege.

So how much did every single one of those mass texts that had the overall friendliness of a hammer with their generic greeting cost me? $0.20/message.

That's right, per message. That I received. That I had no choice but to receive.

I could hear AT&T's registers ringing every time another message came through. I was so annoyed, that I twittered my friends and told them to stop sending messages. I was vexed, and I took it out on the wrong party.

My friends meant well, but it's not their fault the cell companies are charging rates that place text message bandwidth at a premium four times that of sending data to the Hubble space telescope. No, it's the cell companies' fault.

"But it's expensive!" the cell companies cry out. "We have to keep up with demand, and that strains our networks!"

Except that some recent digging around by The New York Times has discovered the dirty little secret of text messages that they don't want you to know: text messages cost the cell company next to nothing to shuttle back and forth. And that next to nothing cost? It barely goes up even as the number of text messages grows exponentially.

See, the only "expensive" part of the journey for text messages is at either end, where the text message has to be transmitted over the air back and forth from the sender and receiver's phones. The part in the middle is handled via a wired network that laughs at the meager 160 bytes of data a text message is composed of.

But even at the relatively expensive wireless ends, it's still costs next to nothing:

...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.

Text messages are a way to monetise unused control channel space!

Really, the most expensive part of the operation is the temporary storage of the messages in the system, but once that's setup, the cost scales minimally even as the amount of messages grows exponentially:

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment -- storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping -- and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. "Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume," he said. "It doesn't cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million."

And yet, as the number of major cell companies has shrunk from six to four in recent years, the charge per message has uniformly gone up to $0.20/message from $0.10 before the mergers started taking place.

This curious coincidence between the mergers and a uniform increase in text message charges has sparked more than 20 class action lawsuits currently in review against the cell companies, and has encouraged an investigation from Senator Herb Kohl, the chairman of the Senate antitrust committee.

Add to that the lawsuits regarding the double charge for text messages (both sending and receiving, even when you don't have a choice), and you've got a possibly sticky situation for some scummy tactics employed by the cell carriers.

What do you think? Are text message charges fair, or are they ridiculous? Sound off in the comments!

What Carriers Aren't Eager to Tell You About Texting [NYT]