The news of this data charges being low should be good. Maybe the operators could take a leaf out of the data charging in subsaharan Africa.

And if they cant, what have they been doing all these years?
i cant imagine they still run off some dusty old server that they had in the early ninety’s. (but then again, they are mobile network operators and generally do seem to do everything a bit backwards)

3p for 160 characters is £0.0001875 per character…that is £0.192 per kilobyte…that is £196.608 per megabyte of data!!!

Just to compare, my old company Easily.co.uk currently offers web hosting and of course data transfer. It charges £140.80 per 100 Gigabytes of data transfer! That equates to £0.001375 per megabyte!!! AND they make a profit on that!!!

So text messaging in terms of data transfer cost is over 143,000 times more expensive than the actual cost of data transfer. Wow!! I wish I could have profit margins like that!

steve

So lets take your calcs a little further…lets say that their net profit on each text is 3p. I use this figure slightly randomnly because ‘who knows what the average profit is on texts’; but it’s also based on the inter-networking arrangement fee being 3p. My personal opinion is the average net profit is a lot more.

3p * 200,000,000 = £6,000,000 profit!!! And that is net profit not revenue!

Now lets assume all of these go to UK people. There are approx 23 million households in the UK (source: environment agency). So if these texts were printed on paper we’d have to deliver 8.7 to each household. Now 8.7 * 160 characters I think you would agree could all fit onto one postcard. That’s 23 million postcards delivered for less than £6 million = 26p each.

So lets ask Mr R. Mail if he can deliver them for us…That’s 23 million postcards, first class post for less than 26p each. Now I haven’t done any bulk sends to all addresses in the UK recently but I think they will do them for a lot less than 26p based on volume!!

So the network operators are going to charge MORE than the Royal Mail to deliver your New Years greetings. And they are going to whinge about it for days and days about how it’s “lots and lots of text and we just don’t know how we’ll manage”. And as Ewan points out, the total is less data than can be stored on our iPod’s!!!!

So my new years resolution for 2007 is Whenever it is possible to write instead, get your pens out, a nice piece of paper or a lovely postcard and write a friendly greeting to your friends, family or even business associates. Add a stamp, take a refreshing walk in the lovely fresh air to the postbox, seal the letter with a kiss and make human interaction real again!

steve
Happy New Year to everyone on smstextnews