Why are we charged R4850 per megabyte for Text Message (SMS)

Zenbaas

Zenbaas

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How Text Messages work

With 35% of all mobile phone users worldwide being active text messaging users (as of 2003), it is the most widely used mobile data service on the planet (according to Wikipedia).

When a text message is sent, it travels wirelessly from a mobile handset to the closest available cellphone tower. From there it’s transferred via wired connections to the destination tower, then transmitted wirelessly from the destination tower to another mobile handset. Text messages (being only 160 characters in length) are so small that the costs associated with the use of the radio spectrum as well as the wired connections should be infinitesimal.

Additionally, text messages don’t use a dedicated channel while being transmitted to cellphone towers. They piggyback on the ‘control channel‘, a range that’s reserved for initiating phone calls and other handset-to-tower and tower-to-handset communication (the use of this channel is why text messages have a length limit: 160 characters is the maximum size of a ‘control message‘).

This channel is always open and always active between handsets and towers; when mobile devices send text messages they’re simply slotted into any openings available.
Calculating the real cost of a Text Message

A text message can be up to 160 characters (the actual size of messages transmitted over cellphone towers’ control channels are 140 bytes - 160 7-bit characters), and 160 characters equal 160 bytes, one byte per character.

In computer science, the common-use values of bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes are calculated as follows:

* 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte (kibibyte) (KB)
* 1024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte (mebibyte) (MB)
* 1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte (gibibyte) (GB)
* 1024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte (tebibyte) (TB)

To calculate how much an SMS costs in terms of megabytes, you need to divide a single full-length message’s cost by 160 to get the cost per byte, multiply the answer by 1024 to get the cost per kilobyte, and multiply it by 1024 again to get the cost per megabyte.

So, assuming that a message is exactly 160 characters long and the carrier charges R0.74 for it (South African Rands, a rough average of the cost on the South African cellphone networks):

* R0.74 / 160 = R0.004625 per byte
* R0.004625 * 1024 = R4.736 per kilobyte
* R4.736 * 1024 = ~ R4850 per megabyte

Paying R4850 per megabyte for any kind of data, even in South Africa with its ridiculous bandwidth pricing, is ludicrous.
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Rest of the article here

We've all know this for a long time but once again just for reinforcement:sick:
 
I'm glad someone started a thread on this, SMS charges have always irritated me. In the beginning they were actually free.
 
porchrat said:
I'm glad someone started a thread on this, SMS charges have always irritated me. In the beginning they were actually free.
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And they also used spare network capacity to send, so they cost the company zilch. Things may have changed now though.
 
porchrat said:
I'm glad someone started a thread on this, SMS charges have always irritated me. In the beginning they were actually free.
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I would say it's shocking but the word honestly doesn't do justice to what we are charged on a daily basis for sms'.

I think Nyanda needs to tackle the cost of sms' next. It is after all the way how "the SA people" communicate:)
 
"Why are we charged R4850 per megabyte for Text Message (SMS)"

Because they can, and we are willing to pay for it.

Basic supply and demand, really.
 
while those number are scary. What is forgotten is all the "meta" data that is sent along with your 160 characters. I mean more info is added to the sms, like destination, source, and alot of other info that i dont care about but the network needs to properly route your message. But stilll, yeah, WOW, we get pwned with the costs.
 
EtienneK said:
"Why are we charged R4850 per megabyte for Text Message (SMS)"

Because they can, and we are willing to pay for it.

Basic supply and demand, really.
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Yes they have done this for a very long time, but I believe it's time(now is better than ever)to start kicking some people in the ballz:mad:
 
yea, there was mention of this some years back - People need make more noise about this - its day lite robbery!
 
EtienneK said:
"Why are we charged R4850 per megabyte for Text Message (SMS)"

Because they can, and we are willing to pay for it.

Basic supply and demand, really.
Click to expand...


Time to wait for another Screamer/Digichilli to come along and shake up the Cellular market?

How would that be for a Christmas present... Reasonably priced uncapped internet and FREE sms...
 
Bizkit87 said:
not entirely what i had in mind...

just meant there are no better answer to why we pay so much, other than the companies raping us...
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Ok fair enough. My point is if enough of us email our new military DOC friend maybe he'll take notice of this as an amazing opportunity for lots of publicity for his department and some well deserved MASSIVE sms price cuts for us.
 
Quit b!tch!ng I pay around R1.40 per SMS in Europe and the poor dudes in the US of A pay to receive SMSs. But I do agree it is a HUGE rip off.
 
Maybe RPM can do a story for us on this in light of all the recent hooha surrounding the interconnect price cuts but how we are still so grossly overcharged for sms'.....?
 
lol dude.

wiki sms (more like 1120 bits instead of 160 per sms):

Message size
Transmission of short messages between the SMSC and the handset is done whenever using the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the SS7 protocol. Messages are sent with the MAP mo- and mt-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 octets (140 octets = 140 * 8 bits = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet (see GSM 03.38 for details), the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UTF-16 alphabet.[29] Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual Short Message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters (including spaces). Support of the GSM 7-bit alphabet is mandatory for GSM handsets and network elements,[29] but characters in languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Cyrillic alphabet languages (e.g. Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc) must be encoded using the 16-bit UTF-16 character encoding (see Unicode). Routing data and other metadata is additional to the payload size.
Larger content (Concatenated SMS, multipart or segmented SMS or "long sms") can be sent using multiple messages, in which case each message will start with a user data header (UDH) containing segmentation information. Since UDH is inside the payload, the number of characters per segment is lower: 153 for 7-bit encoding, 133 for 8-bit encoding and 67 for 16-bit encoding. The receiving handset is then responsible for reassembling the message and presenting it to the user as one long message. While the standard theoretically permits up to 255 segments,[30] 6 to 8 segment messages are the practical maximum, and long messages are often billed as equivalent to multiple SMS messages. See Concatenated SMS for more information. Some providers have offered length-oriented pricing schemes for SMSs, however, the phenomenon is disappearing.
 
Rah_Skill said:
Time to wait for another Screamer/Digichilli to come along and shake up the Cellular market?
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Yeah, Screamer has really "shaken up" the market. The market is so shaken that it is currently warning everyone and their mother against Screamer.

The jury is still out on DigiChilli.
 
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