Why the SMS industry is booming.

Or “How to get over $2500 worth of text onto a 1.44mb floppy disk“.

I read an interesting post on SMS Text News today about the cost of sending SMS data. It’s bloody expensive.

25c (the Australian “normal” price), isn’t a lot of money, right? Not for an SMS. They’re cheap. But let’s take an objective look at what an SMS really is. An SMS is up to 160 characters of GSM 7-bit text. One character of GSM 7-bit text equals, obviously, 7 bits of data. One megabyte (one REAL megabyte) is 1048576 bytes, or 8388608 bits. That’s 1198372.6 (to a first approximation) characters, which is ~7490 SMS messages.

Now this isn’t a 100% accurate figure, I know. SMS messages rarely take up the whole 160 characters, and there is some metadata of some sort (I don’t actually know what a text looks like as a data construct - must look that up!) that hold the sender/recipient details, timestamp etc. and some routing information. Still, making the safe assumption that the routing instructions/metadata doesn’t take up much space, your SMS messages will probably come to less than 1120 bits anyway (160 x 7 bits). So let’s work off 7490 SMS per megabyte.

At the Australian mobile SMS rate of 25c, you’re paying around $1872.50 per megabyte. Telstra’s NextG network, on it’s least-cost-effective data-charged plan, costs 27c/mb (.00015%). Three’s X-Series, at it’s least-cost-effective rate, costs 12c/mb (.000065%). My home broadband line (through AustralisIT) costs a pleasing .002c/mb (.000001%), and even then it’s just shaped.

I haven’t even touched Premium SMS. Just think how much those poor suckers who SMS those late-night dating services at $5/message. They’re paying a decent Australian wage per megabyte.

Sucks to be them!

(Via) (Via)