SMS, The Most Expensive Data Transfer

Do you pay for some of the most expensive data transfers in the world? If you use text messaging, chances are you do.

An SMS message can hold up to 160 characters, making the largest text messages 140 bytes. Assuming you’ve paid for a service like AT&T’s $15 Messaging 1500, you’re paying a penny for every message you send—assuming you meet, but don’t exceed, your 1500 message limit. Sounds like a good deal, right? After all, they’re charging 20 cents per message to the poor users of their GoPhone plans.

Well, what if your internet service provider were to charge a similar rate for data transfers? Consider that an hour-long video from iTunes runs about 650-700 megabytes. At $0.01 per 140 bytes, downloading just one hour of television from iTunes—discounting the purchase price of the content itself—would cost you over $48,000.

Compare that to the $62,000 charge received by a man who downloaded Wall-E on his data card while vacationing in Mexico. He would’ve paid nearly $80,000 at that rate.

If that isn’t compelling enough, consider this: in 2008, Dr. Nigel Bannister of the University of Leicester concluded that sending a 5-pence text message—around 7 cents in the US—cost four times as much as sending a similarly sized piece of data to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Of course, not every text message is 140 bytes and not every customer uses their entire allotment every month, which just makes these expensive data transfers even more expensive.

If that makes you hesitate before sending a text message to your friend down the block, just remember that it could be worse—you could be sending it overseas.