It’s a 160 character string of information. Why does it cost me 25c to send? 160 bytes of data at 25c is $1638.40 per MB! A decent wireless data plan in Sydney costs about 2.5c per MB, so an sms message costs 65,536 times as much as a Internet message of the same size!
Ok, I’m not being fair here. There are sms headers involved that make the message more than 160 bytes. There will be packet losses along the way that might require retransmission, but even so, it certainly will still be more than 50,000 times as expensive per MB.
The major advantage of sms is that it uses a push protocol rather than the pull protocol used in email. This means that when Jannet sends an sms to Margaret, she can be sure that Margaret will receive the message and find out about her wonderful new pair of shoes. In a push protocol, Janet’s message gets sent to an sms server that will keep trying to send the message to Margaret until Margaret’s phone receives the message and notifies Margaret with that annoying message ring-tone that you hate. If she was using a pull protocol, then the message will still be stored on a server, but Jannet will have to wait until Margaret logs into the server and checks for the message.
This surely isn’t 50,000 times as valuable as normal Internet messages. Most modern phone can be programmed to check for messages periodically and automatically. To Margaret, a phone that can do that will be no different from a phone that gets notified of a new message by a server. In fact, a third party can easily set up a server that can offer a push message service at a far lower price than sms. There are already iPhone applications that do this.
Sms is way overpriced. Telcos are not making an effort to make it cheaper because the majority of consumers don’t know that it can be cheaper and are happy to pay the higher price. As soon as smart phones become more common and push message services become more prominent, sms will be dead.
