Happy 20th birthday to the SMS! Let it be the last.

Texting has changed how we use phones, made quick-but-passive communication a thing, and fundamentally altered language. And now it deserves to die. Text messaging is the silliest remaining feature on your smartphone; an egregiously antiquated and overpriced monument to the slow-moving telecom industry. It's impressive that SMS texting made it to 20 — here are three reasons to hope hope it doesn't make it to 25.

1. It's insanely expensive People complain about the price of smartphone data, which is effectively going up as carriers replace unlimited plans with 2 and 3GB capped options. But compared to texting, this is an insanely good value. Consider AT&T's plans for iPhone data: 3GB for $30, or 300MB for $20. This works out to about one $0.01 per megabyte and $0.07 cents per megabyte, respectively. Now, the two options for text plans are a pay-per-message plan, which costs $0.20 per message, and a $20 unlimited plan. Each text message contains about 190 bytes of data, which means that, at per-text rates, texting costs about $1103 per megabyte. Assuming these stats are correct, and text message users send an average of 41.5 messages per day, a month's worth of messages add up to 231 kilobytes, or the size of an Instagram photo or a longish word document. That works out to nearly $88.65 per megabyte. If texts were sent using data — as they really should be in 2012 — that 3GB data plan would let you send 16,953,818 of them.

2. It's a crappy hacked technology that costs carriers almost nothing Now, if SMS texts aren't sent as mobile data, how do they end up on your phone? They're routed through something called the control channel, which was initially designed to pass short, simple status messages from cellphones to towers — just enough to let a tower know which phone is connected to it, or to let a phone know that a call is incoming. This channel must stay open for calls to work, and it would take an astronomical number of text messages to overwhelm it. In terms of infrastructure load, they're basically just hitching a free ride. Passing along a text, in other words, costs carriers very, very little. Almost nothing! And certainly not 20 cents.

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