July 2, 2008
The rising cost of texting
If you thought gas prices were rising too quickly, check out what's been happening to text messaging. News.com reports.
"Since 2005, rates to send and receive text messages on all four major carrier networks have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents per message. This percentage of increase is on par with similar price hikes at the gas pump as crude oil prices skyrocket.
So what's with the 100 percent price hike in two years? When text messages cost carriers very little to transmit. And when compared with what carriers charge for transmitting other data services, such as music downloads or surfing the Web, the text messaging rates seem exurbanite.
One blogger has done the math. If the same pricing was applied on a per-byte basis to downloading one 4MB song it would cost the user almost $6,000 to download a single song via SMS texting.
... The reason that carriers are charging so much for text messages is because they can. Even at 15 cents and 20 cents a pop, people are willing to pay for it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like consumers have much legal recourse for getting carriers to adjust their pricing to a more reasonable rate. There's nothing illegal about charging as much as the market will bear for any service."
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