Americans charged $1000 per MB for text

By on July 31, 2007 in News

Link: You might be paying $1,000 per MB for SMS at mobilejones

 We all know that mobile operators use SMS as a cash cow, and printer ink costs more per drop than melted gold. After some research and a bit of number crunching, mobilejones has very kindly worked out how much US carriers charge per megabyte for texting.

It gets a little complicated as the figures are worked out for normal texts, those from bundles, and domestic vs international – but needless to say it’s a lot of dosh. If you’re curious about how it pans out, check out the original article. 

In case you’re interested, the average UK cost per megabyte of SMS data is about £700. Which is nice.

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  • http://phranticsnr.wordpress.com Daniel

    mobilejones made a mistake. Wiki says the characters in a GSM-standard 160 character SMS are 7 bits, not eight. So you need to at about 14% onto their figures. 8 bit characters max out at only 140 characters due to the limit of 1120 bytes/SMS (I think CDMA uses 8 bit characters?), and languages that require the full Unicode character set (16 bits) only allow for 70 characters.

    I did the numbers for Australia (using the 7-bit, 160 character standard we all know and love) on my blog. Ouch!

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