Message in a bottle: How much do you pay for SMS?

Fascinating comparison from Nigel Bannister at Leicester University (via ShinyShiny)

Text messaging costs four times as much as receiving information from Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope.

It cost £85 to obtain a megabyte of data from Hubble, 595km (370 miles) from Earth, as opposed to sending a 5p text, which works out at about £375 per megabyte.

Scientist Nigel Bannister, of Leicester University, said: ‘Hubble is by no means a cheap mission – but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical.’

tapology.com

In Australia, we have Telstra, Optus and Vodafone and Hutchison as Network providers, and a growing list MVNO's.

In Australia a standard sms text is of 160 characters, which costs $0.25.
1024 characters = 1Kbytes * (lets be generous to the Telcos) = $1.60
1 Mb = 1024 Kbytes, therefore $1.60 x 1024 = $1638.40 (per megabyte).

In Australia it costs a whopping $1638.40 per megabyte of data to be sent via SMS !!!

Mobile communications messages are currently 100% profit to the Telcos.

At the current conversion rate 375 GBP = 773 AUD

Australian Telcos are charging over 200% the amount that their British equivalents are.

I hear someone say "BUT WAIT!!! there's a perfect explanation for this.."
It's called GOUGING !!!


(*definition can vary - kilobyte )