Text Messages are a Rip Off...DUH

The New York Times: Text messages cost carriers virtually nothing

No shit....I think we new that. But thanks for reminding us.
From John Brownlee and BB Gadgets... Click here for his full post and NYT story.

The New York Times has a good piece up on the heavy curtain of secrecy that surrounds mobile carriers' profit margins on text messaging. In short, they're bilking you... but you already knew that. But here's a pretty simple explanation of why the text messages you pay twenty cents each to send costs the carrier basically nothing:

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But 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.

Thanks John for your read on the whole deal. Visit BB Gadgets for more gadget news.