I pay my cellular carrier $5 a month to send and receive 200 SMS messages a month. As if that’s not enough, the company is essentially double dipping: they charge both the sender and recipient for the same message, doubling its cost.
Besides wanting to make a profit, is there any justifications for these charges? Does SMS messaging require an separate, expensive infrastructure or anything else that make providing the service unexpectedly costly?
No. That’s basically pure profit for them - text messages cost next to nothing.
Cell phones transmit voice digitally, at the rate of approximately 100,000 bytes per minute. Roughly speaking, that means that one minute of phone conversation costs the cell phone company the same as transmitting 1000+ text messages. Additionally, phone conversations have to occur in real-time (the lag can’t be more than a second or so, otherwise you’d notice it) but text messages can be delayed indefinitely until there is spare network capacity to carry them.
In short, text messages / message plans are pure profit for the cell phone companies.
However, if you think that’s a bad thing, or unfair, or whatever, you’re being rather narrow-minded. The cell phone companies want to earn a certain profit. If they lowered the prices on their now-extremely-profitable text message plans, they’d make less profit, and would probably raise prices on the rest of their service as a result.
If you are a frequent user of text messages, you will probably pay the same amount per month regardless of how your cell phone company chooses to balance where it gets its profits from - voice minutes vs. text messages.
However, if you don’t use text messages much, then rejoice! Because all those texters are subsidizing your voice-only plan.
Because people will pay that much for them.
Also, on my family plan, it’s $10 for four phones for unlimited texting. You may want to shop around for a better plan.
I’m confused. Aren’t SMS messages the same as text? I understood that SMS were from a computer to a cell where texts are cell to cell.
No… SMS, Short Message Service, is the formal name for text messaging. It was originally only between mobiles on the GSM networks, but then they put in all sorts of web gateways and inter-carrier exchanges and whatnot and now you can text between GSM mobiles and web interfaces and email and non-GSM carriers and Skype phones and even landlines (my carrier has a service where you can text to a regular Plain Old Telephone Service line and the system rings the phone and reads the text message to the recipient).
Some common SMS email addresses:
[10-digit phone number]@message.alltel.com
[10-digit phone number]@txt.att.net
[10-digit phone number]@myboostmobile.com
[10-digit telephone number]@messaging.nextel.com
[10-digit phone number]@messaging.sprintpcs.com
[10-digit phone number]@tmomail.net
[10-digit phone number]@vtext.com
[10-digit phone number]@vmobl.com