Uh… interesting timing? It’s almost as if the Large Throbbing Brains at Bell and Rogers started their weekly monopoly conference call like this:
Rogers Brain: “We’re getting hammered in the press for this iPhone thing. This would be a good time for you guys to slip in that SMS policy you’ve been lusting over recently. With the press I’ve been stirring they might not even notice…”
Bell Brain: “My God, you’re a genius! I can get that ivory back scratcher I’ve always wanted…”
I’m sorry, but this is absolutely f’ing absurd. The fact that we pay so much to SEND SMS is bad enough as it is - name ANY other form of communication that doesn’t involve a ROUND TRIP TO MARS that costs $1/kb. With this change it’ll be $2, given that they’ll be screwing us at both ends.
Lets think about this for a second and play with some numbers. I admit this is a naive exercise that doesn’t capture the true volume of data the carriers have to deal with but even if it’s off by a factor of 100 it still doesn’t reflect the severity they’d have us believe. The article I linked to claims that Canadians send 45.4 million SMS messages a day. Let’s assume that every message is as big as it can be, which according to the SMS specification (buried here) is 160 characters. Naively assuming a character == a byte, that means there’s roughly 7,264 million bytes which is just over 7gb. So, all of Canada generates so little SMS traffic that it can be stored on a solid state memory key. THIS is the burden we’re supposed to believe the carriers are struggling to accommodate? Are we really to believe that 7gb of traffic costs $6.8 million a day (45.4m * $.15) to deliver? Let’s put that volume in context: how much bandwidth does your average voice call consume? Something tells me it’s a helluva lot more than 160 bytes.
To sear it from a different angle, use the $2/kb data rate as a benchmark. Suddenly the unpopular supplemental iPhone data rate of $.50/mb seems downright generous doesn’t it?
This is a cash grab, pure and simple, and it’s easily the most sickening one to date from our beloved Canadian telecommunications monopoly. At least we’re seeing some blowback from our political parties - the NDP appears to be on this, at least superficially - they’ve started a petition here.
At this pace I should be disappointed on a weekly basis.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Aaron // Jul 9, 2008 at 5:41 am
SMS started as a dirty hack on top of GSM. It was never intended to be used widely and used in incredibly inefficient way of sending data over circuit-switched networks.
The UK government actually mandated a maximum price at 12p (~24c) per message when the service was first introduced. I believe the breakdown was it cost 4p to send the message, 3p to send a delivery report back, tax was 2p and that left 3p profit for the carrier.
Since this all happened, SMS has obviously exploded in popularity and sending SMS has become way more efficient as packet-switched networks have come widespread.
Messages are a maximum of 160 characters long and are encoded in 7-bit. However, there’s also quite a lot of header information, so the maximum size is probably around 300 bytes. Over a packet network, it costs next to nothing to send. To make matters worse, most carriers don’t support delivery reports any more.
The government has never updated the maximum cost and as a result SMS is a massive cash cow for the carriers. I guess the government hasn’t updated the maximum price in guilt at how badly they ripped off the carriers for the 3G licenses.
To charge for incoming SMS is worse than charging for incoming calls. Imagine if broadband providers charged for incoming e-mail. No-one would use it! The reason why the American and Canadian mobile networks have lagged behind is because of the way they’ve been regulated (thanks mainly to the Bell split-up). It’s stopped foreign companies coming in and providing some real competition and investment. I wonder if someone like Vodafone would come in if allowed?
2 pookzilla // Jul 9, 2008 at 6:32 am
We’re actually in the midst of a spectrum auction - http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/06/24/spectrum-four-billion.html . That article is a bit old but I think that may be close to resolving itself. It’d be nice to have another carrier to choose from.
3 Aaron // Jul 9, 2008 at 10:16 am
Looks like they’re selling off the 700Mhz spectrum.
That’s pretty useless to most people as current phones operate at 850/900/1700/1800/1900/2100Mhz at the moment.
The US is selling off the same chunk so perhaps it’ll lead to something good eventually.
4 Gianna // Jul 24, 2008 at 6:46 am
Well put! 7gb is laughable!
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