There’s a reason why SMS is a hundred billion dollar industry … and it’s simply that phones companies are unbelievably greedy.
Note: the three examples cited are, respectively: from your internet service provider via high-speed modem, over standard text messaging systems, and snail mail via the United States Postal Service. All are assuming that data is transmitted digitally (in the case of the snail mail, the bits are written on paper.)
COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:
TCP/IP: $1
TCP/SMS: $61,356,851.20
USPS: $307,072.00 (Bits written out on paper)So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.
What exactly justifies making SMS messages sixty one million times more expensive than ISP data and 200x more expensive than TCP/USPS? How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.
Full article here. Well worth the read!
(I originally saw this at Slashdot. As noted at Digg, here seems to be a technical issue with that page – if you don’t see the article at that link, try the home page. It should be the top story there for a while.)