I’ve been reading a lot of news stories over the past few days that have been promoting an awe-struck message that, for example, one mobile operator is expecting to process 200 million text messages on New Year’s Eve.
I immediately thought, ‘oooh 200 million, that’s a lot………….’
Oooorrrrrrrrrrr is it?
I then knocked up some classic SMS Text News back-of-the-fag-packet calculations. Do remember that I’m no network level guru so if you are, feel free to correct the following.
200 million text messages.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that each text message requires ONLY 160 characters (I’m disgregarding overhead)
200 million messages x 160 characters = 32,000,000,000 characters.
For the sake of argument assume that this is 32,000,000,000 bytes, yes? Run with me on this one.
Now factor this figure down by 1024 to get Kilobytes.
32,000,000,000 divided by 1024 = 31,250,000k
Factor it down by another 1024 to get Megabytes….
31,250,000k divided by 1024 = 30,517.57 megabytes.
Or, roughly 30 gig.
Butter me in whisky and call me Kevin if that isn’t a piece of simplicity to process.
YES there’s database calls, yes there’s overhead, yes there’s localised congestion, yes there’s a ton of messages sent aorund midnight, but they’re not using your bog standard Dell laptop to process it, are they? (Well everyone but [insert name of your currently unfavoured operator here]. Most operators are kitted out with big servers, big big big servers with big support costs and huuuuuuuuuge processing power.
There might be the odd issue in terms of delivering text messages through a massively congested network, but they’ll get there. They should. They shouldn’t be lost or deleted by panicked admins. Those days should be well behind us.
So if your messages fail to deliver within 30 seconds on New Year’s Eve, let me know so I can publish a list of mobile operators who’re clearly not the full shilling in terms of their technology capabilities.
(Oh, and feel free to correct my brilliant mathematics.)
Nacho on 
Comment by Paul Worsley on 30 December 2006:
Good maths Ewan, based on 10P a text the equivalent data cost is £640 a meg!
Comment by steve procter on 30 December 2006:
oooh nice one Ewan to get our ‘almost 2007′ teeth stuck into.
So lets take your calcs a little further…lets say that their net profit on each text is 3p. I use this figure slightly randomnly because ‘who knows what the average profit is on texts’; but it’s also based on the inter-networking arrangement fee being 3p. My personal opinion is the average net profit is a lot more.
3p * 200,000,000 = £6,000,000 profit!!! And that is net profit not revenue!
Now lets assume all of these go to UK people. There are approx 23 million households in the UK (source: environment agency). So if these texts were printed on paper we’d have to deliver 8.7 to each household. Now 8.7 * 160 characters I think you would agree could all fit onto one postcard. That’s 23 million postcards delivered for less than £6 million = 26p each.
So lets ask Mr R. Mail if he can deliver them for us…That’s 23 million postcards, first class post for less than 26p each. Now I haven’t done any bulk sends to all addresses in the UK recently but I think they will do them for a lot less than 26p based on volume!!
So the network operators are going to charge MORE than the Royal Mail to deliver your New Years greetings. And they are going to whinge about it for days and days about how it’s “lots and lots of text and we just don’t know how we’ll manage”. And as Ewan points out, the total is less data than can be stored on our iPod’s!!!!
So my new years resolution for 2007 is
Whenever it is possible to write instead, get your pens out, a nice piece of paper or a lovely postcard and write a friendly greeting to your friends, family or even business associates. Add a stamp, take a refreshing walk in the lovely fresh air to the postbox, seal the letter with a kiss and make human interaction real again!
steve
Happy New Year to everyone on smstextnews
Comment by steve procter on 30 December 2006:
sorry just need to add this bit as well…..
3p for 160 characters is £0.0001875 per character…that is £0.192 per kilobyte…that is £196.608 per megabyte of data!!!
Just to compare, my old company Easily.co.uk currently offers web hosting and of course data transfer. It charges £140.80 per 100 Gigabytes of data transfer! That equates to £0.001375 per megabyte!!! AND they make a profit on that!!!
So text messaging in terms of data transfer cost is over 143,000 times more expensive than the actual cost of data transfer. Wow!! I wish I could have profit margins like that!
steve
Comment by nec on 31 December 2006:
actually it is 28,000,000,000 bytes. each sms character is encoded with 7 bit (ASCII char)
Comment by Paul on 31 December 2006:
Surely after over ten years of people flooding the networks systems with text messages on new years eve they should now be in a situation where they can pretty much cope with no problems!?
And if they cant, what have they been doing all these years?
i cant imagine they still run off some dusty old server that they had in the early ninety’s. (but then again, they are mobile network operators and generally do seem to do everything a bit backwards)
Comment by David McQueen on 31 December 2006:
“Butter me in whisky and call me Kevin?”…OK then
The news of this data charges being low should be good. Maybe the operators could take a leaf out of the data charging in subsaharan Africa.
Comment by Alex on 2 January 2007:
All that money the operators make out of SMS on NYE all goes into the black hole that is their 3G network licence bids and rollout debt. I mean it’s not as if anything else is gonna pay for it.. would take a hell of a lot of video calling to make a difference.