$66 dollars for 1 megabyte of data

Damn I’m paying 10 cents per text.

“Are you a fan of texting?  I certainly am.  There have been months when I blew through my texting plan, and got a nasty bill in the mail.  I was thinking about this today and It’s amazing how badly we are being ripped off by the phone companies for what amounts to just standard data.

Did you know that a full text message, including text and headers is only about 160 bytes?  That’s right.  BYTES,  not kilobytes, not megabytes.  Bytes.  And even if you have a texting plan for lets say 1000 messages for $10.00 a month,  you’re still paying 1 cent per text.  1 cent for 160 bytes.  In that sense, that doesn’t sound like much, I know.  It’s hard to get angry over 1 cent.  But in this time of high speed mobile internet, and $30 unlimited 3g data plans,  charging 1 cent for 160 bytes, is the internet equivalent of throwing you on a bed of hot coals and raping you.

Let me explain.

You’re average MP3 from iTunes or Zune, or wherever you get your music, is somewhere around 4 megabytes.  Thats 4,194,304 bytes.

So, if you were charged the same amount of money per byte to download your music,  guess how much that single mp3 would cost?

$262.14.   OVER TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS.  For a single song, downloaded once.

Hell, if you were charged that data rate,  guess how much it would cost you JUST to load the homepage of this site?

$32.00.  Just to go to ONE web site, ONE TIME.

Ridiculous isnt it?  And that is pricing based on having a texting plan.  Now granted, my math is off if you’re paying 10 cents per text,  or if you have an unlimited texting plan.   Also, you wouldn’t want to, nor be able to, transfer that much data over SMS, but the fact is, that since SMS messages are just standard data, there is absolutely no reason that Cellphone companies should charge you so much for so little data, especially in addition to an unlimited data plan.

The funny thing is, that people who would complain about tiered internet access, with 5GB per month caps, have no problem forking over the extra $10 per month for thier text plans.

This needs to stop, and it needs to stop now.  I would like to suggest sending a snail mail ( so that they actually read it ) letter to your mobile carrier, letting them know that you are fed up with the high prices for SMS data, and that a change needs to be made.  I’ll be sending mine to T-Mobile today.”- Justin Flood

I found this at

http://justinflood.com/

For this exact post go to:

http://justinflood.com/?p=300

~ by manny135 on August 7, 2008.