A few weeks ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the silly-high cost of text messages. At the time I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. I wrote:
“Unlimited text messaging plans are a couple bucks a month.”
Well, I was wrong. I (thought) I paid $10 a month for unlimited text messages on my Verizon phone. In reality all I get is unlimited text messaging to other Verizon IN Members and 500 messages a month for the rest. This has got me pretty annoyed, because for a consulting project I am currently working on I am sending/receiving somewhere on the order of 2400+ messages per month to an email account hosted on a dedicated server, which I’m pretty sure isn’t a Verizon IN Member. For $20 a month, I can get 5000 messages, which should be sufficient for the foreseeable future.
But I mean, come on Verizon! What is the marginal cost of processing 500 messages per month versus 5000? It’s zero. Absolutely zero.
One single phone call contains more data and bytes than tens of thousands of text messages. On my phone I get unlimited Internet, unlimited email, unlimited data, and thousands of voice minutes a month and yet for $10 I can only send 500 sub-200 byte messages?
I wouldn’t be writing this post if the project I’m working on required only me to deal with so many text messages. However, there are a large number of people who would be using this and would also likely surpass the 500 message a month limit. And now that I know Verizon’s plan isn’t unlimited, that leaves me to believe other carriers are the same way. This poses a big problem for this particular project, as it would be a hassle for every user to have to upgrade their cell plan.
I can understand that text messaging charges are a huge profit generator for wireless carriers. I don’t mind it that much. I am willing to pay the $10 a month so I can use this feature which costs Verizon $0.0000001 to offer me. But there’s a limit.
Whereas it makes sense for voice minutes to be tiered because voice calls put a legitimate strain on the capacity of the networks–you cannot say the same thing about text messages. If the quantity of text messages sent tripled today I would be shocked, shocked, if any server on the TelCo grid even blinked.
The discussion on Hacker News and on the linked article go in to more detail about the issue. All I wanted to say that my original statement was wrong and I now definitely agree that Text Messaging prices are way too high. All the more reason why we need Android to come out soon.
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