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.

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?