“This year, we will zing out 1.2 trillion [Short Message Service (SMS) texts], predicts market-intelligence firm IDC,” Eric Bender reports for TIME Magazine.
“The average U.S. mobile teen now sends or receives an average of 2,899 text messages per month, according to Nielsen Mobile,” Bender reports. “‘With teens, the act of picking up a phone and calling someone is dropping away,’ notes Christopher Collins, a senior analyst with Yankee Group.”
“What’s most amazing about the texting craze is just how inexpensive it is for mobile carriers to provide this wildly popular service,” Bender reports. “SMS messages are not only extremely short (maxing out at 160 characters), but they also cleverly exploit today’s digital phone networks, leveraging transmission channels between phone and cell tower that were originally designed to coordinate voice calls. ‘They cost the mobile carriers so little that you could argue that they’re free,’ says Collins.”
“Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and an expert on mobile computing, …found that a text message doesn’t cost providers more than 0.3 cent,” Bender reports. “You don’t have to be a Wall Street analyst to do the quick math: with a carrier cost of one-third of a penny, when a customer pays 15 cents to send a message, 98% of that 15 cents is pure profit.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve said many times, most recently here, “Data is data and carriers charging separate and extra amounts for some data (SMS, for example) is absurd and a scam.”
5 Day Most Commented