Actual cost of your SMS messages

When SMS was introduced at the beginning of the 90ies in Europe, it was basicly free. There were SMS gateways all over the Internet. But then the carriers were recognizing the marketing potential of SMS, and slowly the prices per single message were rising until they reached 49 ct (in Germany at the end of the 90ies). Only when parents were stunned by the SMS cost of their children, protests started to mount, and then the diverse regulation offices in the different countries were trying to limit SMS prices, so there were actual plans which included for example 1000 short messages per month.

A standard SMS message contains up to 140 bytes (1120 bits) of data - this takes care of the 160 characters allowed in your text message. This might not make sense at first, until you realize that SMS uses 7 - not 8 - bit characters - leaving you with 128 possible character values instead of the normal 256. So 1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.

So our total message length is about a tenth of a kilobyte (.13671875 Kbytes). In terms that the iPod generation would understand - if you had an iPod with a tenth of a kilobyte you could fit 1/4000th of a song on it. I assume here and for the rest of this article that 1 song = 4 Megabytes.

If you divide 140 (the total number of bytes available to you) by 20 (the cost per message), you find that you are paying 1 cent for every 7 bytes of data. This leaves you with a cost of $1,497.97 for the 1024Kbytes contained in a single megabyte. iPod users: It would cost you $5,991.88 to transfer - not even to buy - a single song via SMS.

I found this article give us more insight about the play behind this SMS business, Read More…

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