SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble | Hacker News Reader

SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble

physorg.com

25 pointsdrm23721 comments

It doesn't just cost consumers either. If you're a developer who wants to implement SMS in an app, you're looking at probably $.05 per message, maybe shaving a bit off with a volume buy.

I had a fun app that I have largely given up on once I realized it was just too cost prohibitive to offer the service for free and allow SMS messaging.

(This was using Clickatell btw.)

Is this true? My server sends SMS' to cells without problems. I've been sending them to email addresses like 6175551234@vtext.com (for a verizon cell). Is it because my volume is low that I am allowed to do this for free, or because I am using the email address format?

Yeah, you can send them via email for free. There may or may not be other restrictions that I"m aware of.

Your method, however, requires the user to know the provider of the number. In the application I had made, users could send messages via SMS by just typing in the number.

(Also, at least for my own provider, AT&T, some crud ends up in the message, e.g the subject line of the email.)

Thanks. I hope there aren't restrictions but if there are, I'll find out the hard way in the next few months. Yeah, crud ends up in my Verizon messages to. I'm using PHP though and have been able to mess around with headers and such to send clean messages.

As a customer, I hate getting gouged by text messaging.

As an entrepreneur, it gives me hope that there are useful services which people are willing to pay for directly. The social/viral distribution of sms is impressive: it costs me to send a message to my friends, and I'm encouraging them to spend money with their provider in order to respond.

I really don't see that "dollars per byte" is a sensible way to measure the price of transferring data.

If it makes you feel any better, think of the SMS fee it as a five pence fee for establishing the connection, and then a negligible per-byte cost which gets rounded down to zero cents. Happy now? Is five pence really all that unreasonable a price for sending a message?

Don't get me wrong: phone companies do all sorts of things which are annoying, overpriced and/or unethical, but I don't see this as one of them.

this kind of gouging has to turn off consumers. I know when I heard a gallon of inkjet ink was $4,000 I immediately started looking for better solutions

By volume, inkjet ink is more expensive than vintage champagne. By volume, SMS is more expensive than hand delivered postcards. There's no excuse for such gouging.

By volume, 20oz bottled water is more expensive than gasoline. And will continue to be so until gas hits $7/gallon.

Smart industries charge what the market will bear.

but i would like to think there is a ethical point of profit (I.E. credit card companies in my mind lack a company '"ethical backbone")

I don't know if gasoline in 20oz containers would be any cheaper than water.

Talk about comparing apples to oranges. I could send a few terabytes (or 100 32GB SD cards) from one location to another for about $20 and compare the costs of sending data on the Internet unfavorably to it. Like this, however, such a comparison would make no sense.

OK, let's talk about how sending data via SMS is astronomically more expensive than sending data over a standard broadband Internet connection, a more terrestrial comparison.

Why not talk about how, for most short messages, sending an SMS is cheaper than making a phone call to transmit the same information?

The real question is: who says that the cost of transmitting information should be linear with the amount of data? If you want to transmit a hundred bytes then SMS is a good way to do it. If you want to transmit five gigs, then some other way would be better.

Because that's how things work in a lot of other services?

For instance, if you sign up for shared hosting and go over your alloted bandwidth, they may charge you $0.50 a gigabyte or so. That is linear and it seems reasonable.

What would happen if you could stream high-quality video from mobile phones? With large data transfer capabilities would come interesting new possibilities for markets, companjies, and customers.

There was an article in a major media outlet (too tired to look it up now!) within the last six months about that. It was posted on Slashdot too where a big discussion ensued about what a ridiculous comparison it was also.

Talk to someone in the mobile industry and they'll brush this off as "not being afraid to charge for value", or at least that's how someone like Russell Beattie describes it.

Which "value" is he referring to? It seems more like they charge this much because consumers lack better options than to put up with it.

People find rationalizations for doing unethical things.

I'm sure oil executives talk with each other about, literally, powering America.

I'm just wondering what he'd say. It's a very poor rationalization if he can't even answer that basic question.

What is wrong about powering America?

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