Sunday, January 18, 2009

Text Messaging is 20x the cost of email (at least in Barbados)

This was brought to my attention by a friend. So a character (or one letter) is about 8 bits. 8 bits make 1 byte and 1024 bytes make 1 kilobyte. So 1 character is 1 byte. A text, message is 160 characters of body. There must be 22 characters (+12345678910) for the number sending and the number receiving (probably in a header of some kind) so thats 182 characters, at least in Barbados. Call it 190 to be safe. 190 characters or 190 bytes is 20c bds (whether you use 25 or all 190). That's about $1 a kilobyte vs 1c per 1kb for data. Therefore an email that contains 200 characters (including the header) costs 1c since thats not one whole kilobyte but a text message which is of comparable size is 20c so text messaging is about 20 times as expensive as sending an email AND the charge is flat not per kb. wtf!

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