4 ms·

In what way is it a price fixing scam??? In the same way your electricity supply is a price fixing scam? Please don't believe the idiotic articles claiming tha

by axod 18y ago

In what way is it a price fixing scam??? In the same way your electricity supply is a price fixing scam? Please don't believe the idiotic articles claiming that sending an SMS costs the mobile companies nothing...

bprater 18y ago
If all the phone carriers get together and say, "Hey Bob -- if you keep the price of your SMS at 10c, I promise to keep the price of SMS at 10c. We agree to not compete on SMS pricing. That way we can make lots of moola on something that costs both of us nothing."
- titocosta 18y ago
  that's why they raised it from 10 to 20 cents over the last few years
- russell 18y ago
  That's collusion and it's illegal. They just watch each other. If verizon doesn't move, Sprint doesn't either. That's also the way airlines match prices.
russell 18y ago
Some plans charge 1000 times as much per byte for text as for voice. I would say the difference between zero and non-zero is just noise.
omouse 18y ago
SMS costs the carriers virtually nothing. Not exactly $0 but very close, something like $0.000000000000001.
- eru 18y ago
  They do not contribute to variable costs. But in theory the money made from SMS could be used to cross-subsidize calls.
iigs 18y ago
The base station (edge) and network-infrastructure (backhaul) equipment probably can't be purchased without SMS functionality at this point. There's no delivery commitment on SMS/MMS messages and traffic at essentially every site is cyclical. SMS gets delivered in the idle space, therefore the marginal bandwidth cost is literally zero. That pretty much leaves the SMSC/MMSC (the dedicated hardware that processes messages in the center/edge of the mobile network). Perhaps $0.10/message was justified in 2000 when this stuff was only being used by phone geeks, but I think there's a bit of margin in it these days. :)
m_eiman 18y ago
Well, I guess that the fact that sending data through SMS costs four times more per byte than downloading data from the Hubble telescope sort of tells people that they're being screwed. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/303/1046303/sms-costs-hubble http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/303/1046303/sms-cos... And sure - it costs the operator more than zero to send an SMS, but it's so close to zero that it's hard to tell the numbers apart.

by axod 18y ago

bprater 18y ago

If all the phone carriers get together and say, "Hey Bob -- if you keep the price of your SMS at 10c, I promise to keep the price of SMS at 10c. We agree to not compete on SMS pricing. That way we can make lots of moola on something that costs both of us nothing."

titocosta 18y ago
that's why they raised it from 10 to 20 cents over the last few years
russell 18y ago
That's collusion and it's illegal. They just watch each other. If verizon doesn't move, Sprint doesn't either. That's also the way airlines match prices.

russell 18y ago

Some plans charge 1000 times as much per byte for text as for voice. I would say the difference between zero and non-zero is just noise.

omouse 18y ago

SMS costs the carriers virtually nothing. Not exactly $0 but very close, something like $0.000000000000001.

eru 18y ago
They do not contribute to variable costs. But in theory the money made from SMS could be used to cross-subsidize calls.

iigs 18y ago

The base station (edge) and network-infrastructure (backhaul) equipment probably can't be purchased without SMS functionality at this point. There's no delivery commitment on SMS/MMS messages and traffic at essentially every site is cyclical. SMS gets delivered in the idle space, therefore the marginal bandwidth cost is literally zero. That pretty much leaves the SMSC/MMSC (the dedicated hardware that processes messages in the center/edge of the mobile network). Perhaps $0.10/message was justified in 2000 when this stuff was only being used by phone geeks, but I think there's a bit of margin in it these days. :)

m_eiman 18y ago

Well, I guess that the fact that sending data through SMS costs four times more per byte than downloading data from the Hubble telescope sort of tells people that they're being screwed. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/303/1046303/sms-costs-hubble http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/303/1046303/sms-cos... And sure - it costs the operator more than zero to send an SMS, but it's so close to zero that it's hard to tell the numbers apart.