Blogger Computes the “True Price” of an SMS
by Russell Shaw
In what has got to be one of the more clever undertakings I have heard about in quite the long while, blogger “Sam” of the website a gthing science project has figured out the actual cost of an SMS text message.
Although I have a hunch Sam had about two too many cups of coffee and too much time on his hands when he jumped into this undertaking,
Sam writes in part that:
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.
Then Sam adds that if the cost of transferring a song to your iPod using the SMS transfer rates he figured out were actually in practice, it would cost you $5,991.88 to transfer a single song via SMS.
Oh, and… don’t forget the cost of buying the track.
