shouting loudly

Here’s a great article by the Times exposing how text messages are incredibly overpriced and discussing one Senator’s investigation into the subject.

Text messages may cost you and me $.20 per, but they cost the carriers almost nothing to send, says Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. Here’s a chunk from the article:

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.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping — and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. “Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume,” he said. “It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million.”

Keshav is no radical with an agenda, either; his research has been funded by one of the four major carriers.

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, has begun an investigation, only to be effectively stonewalled by carriers.

That texting is radically overpriced relative to carrier costs has been an open secret for years. I’m glad to see Congress looking into it.