To be fair, there is overhead to opening a connection. If sending a text was a matter of transmitting 160 bytes, it wouldn't take a second or two to send. Net

To be fair, there is overhead to opening a connection. If sending a text was a matter of transmitting 160 bytes, it wouldn't take a second or two to send. Networks now transmit at 600kbps easy and yet my messages don't send in 1/3750th of a second. And that network usage counts. Calculating it based on the number of bytes just seems unfair. That said, they're still overpriced. They should cost less than a minute of phone conversation. Really, they should cost probably around the equivalent of 1 second of phone conversation. So, you should be able to send 60 messages for, say, 10cents. That would come to $10-11/MB by your logic which is high if you don't count the cost of building/tearing down the connection.