Cha-ching! Telcos overcharge for text messages. We all know that, right? Unless you specifically subscribe to a text message plan in the United States, the carriers will charge you an exorbitant rate per message. For example, Verizon Wireless and AT&T will both charge $0.20 per text message if you don’t buy a texting plan from them. Even at a more conservative pricing of five cents per message, that means the carriers are charging around $383,000 per gigabyte.

By comparison, the total cost for the Mars Global Surveyor to send a gigabyte back to Earth, is only $284,000. This includes the $200 million cost of launching the satellite, and nine years of operational costs incurred by its NASA crew. That’s right — it costs US tax payers $99,000 less to send a gigabyte of data from Mars than it does for cellphone users to send a gigabyte worth of 160 character text messages.

Rick Falkvinge’s math shows that it would take 7.67 million text messages to make up a gigabyte. That may sound like a lot, but consider that in the US alone we have over 300 million cellphones in use as of this past June. Worldwide, we have over six billion mobile phones in operation. That’s a lot of potential text messages. After doing some rough calculations about what it actually costs telcos to transfer data, Falkvinge comes up with a shocking 15,000,000,000% markup on text messages. That’s a tough pill to swallow even at a tiny fraction of the current markup.

It’s no wonder that Apple wanted to get around this obnoxious gouging for its customers by implementing iMessage on its devices. While the stability hasn’t been great, Tim Cook announced back at the iPad Mini event that over 300 billion messages have been sent using iMessage — completely disregarding the costly text message system of the carriers. Before Apple took on the telcos, RIM’s BlackBerry phones were praised heavily for BBM’s ability to circumvent the need for pricey text messaging. Even though RIM’s brand has been significantly devalued, BBM is still widely used in some markets. It’s obvious why it was so successful when you see the money that can be saved by bypassing text messages.

The advent of unlimited talk and text plans have made the high-end market of smartphones and feature phones somewhat easier to accept, but pay-as-you-go plans at the bottom of the market are still shockingly overpriced. Whenever telcos like AT&T complain about overtaxed networks, and decide to implement restrictions on features like FaceTime for paying customers with data plans, let’s just remember how much they gouge us. Twenty cents for 140 bytes of text is absolutely ridiculous, and they know it.

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