Paying For Incoming SMS Messages

Posted by pookzilla on July 8, 2008

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.