Texting has to be the biggest form of message sharing that we have today and the wireless carriers are laughing all the way to the bank with every one that is sent.
First some basic facts about SMS texting and its cost courtesy of a great post by Knowlton Thomas at TechVibes.
Let’s suppose you text your friend the following: “Yo Joe, what’s up bud?”. Well it turns out that a short message like that ends up costing the carrier 1/1,000 of a cent. So if you send out anywhere around a 1,000 messages it might end up costing the carrier one single penny and for those of you that are message crazy, well, you might cost the carrier two cents.
But here’s the thing, most carrier have a package deal for your monthly texting costs that get charged to your bill and most of them are around the $5 mark so in effect the carrier is making $4.98 profit each and every month from every single subscriber who has a texting plan.
Then there are those that have pay-as-you-go plan, and this is where it gets insane because in most cases those people are paying 20¢ per message which means the carrier is making 0.19.999¢ profit on each message.
Now to add insult to injusry – it seems that most times these messages actually don’t cost the carrier anything.
But as if this isn’t ridiculous enough already, there’s icing on the cake: SMS are piggybacked onto cellular networks. This means that text messages occupy, as William puts it, “otherwise unused space in a control channel used for network maintenance.” So texting, most of the time, doesn’t even cost your wireless carrier that fraction of a penny. It costs them, quit literally, nothing.
via TechVibes
And the carriers wonder why their customers hate them.
