

Telcos are ripping you off. If you are surprised by this, you may also be interested in some prime real estate I have for sale. It's on the Moon.

But just because we all know that we are being scammed doesn't make the manner of the sting any less interesting. A piece in the New York Times goes into some detail on the cost of text messages to the cell carriers and concludes that it is close to zero. An SMS doesn't even take any bandwidth away from the regular channels which carry calls:

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.

Cost to telco: $0.00. Cost to customers: $0.20. Number of text messages sent per year (worldwide): 2.5 trillion. We'll leave you to do the math. Suffice it to say that printer ink market now looks like a bargain.

What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting [NYT]