I was just looking at my cellphone bill this morning and I've determined that cellphone companies truly suck. Why you ask? Here's why:
I have an "unlimited*" data access plan on my phone. $15/mo lets me send and receive email, browse the web, look at Google Maps, and hell, even update my blog, all to my heart's content. According to my bill, I used 181,696 KB of data transfer last month. More than I would have expected, but what do I care? It's "free".
So let's look at this from a cost standpoint... 181,696 KB for $15 works out to roughly $0.0826 per megabyte (I'm using mega = 10^6 rather than 2^30, as bandwidth is typically computed in powers of 10). For reference, I estimate that I used approximately 20,159,280 KB at home over the last month at a cost of about $40, for an approximate cost of $0.00198 per megabyte.
So what's the complaint here? Text messages. Last month, I received exactly one text message. Note the bold and italicized text there. RECEIVED and ONE. And the message wasn't sent to me from a friend, or even a random stranger spamming me... It was sent to me BY SPRINT. I did not ask for this message, nor was there any real reason for them to send me the text message. But they still felt the need to charge me for it. How much? 15 cents. Why? Because my cell plan WHICH INCLUDES UNLIMITED DATA does not include text messaging.
Oh, but it's only 15 cents, you say. Forget about it, you say. I say no. Text messages (aka SMS, or Short Messaging Servies) are limited to 160 characters... 160 bytes. One sixth of a kilobyte. And for this message, they have the gall to charge $0.15. That's $937.50 per megabyte. Let me spell that out for you. NINE HUNDRED THIRTY SEVEN DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS PER MEGABYTE. 11,350 times more than I paid for my data service. And this particular message wasn't even 160 bytes. It was less, which means the rate is even higher than that.
How do the companies get away with this? I don't know. Lily Tomlin said it best. See the title.
* My "unlimited" plan isn't actually unlimited. It's limited to some arbitrary value which they define as "excessive". They won't publish what this value is, but if you exceed it, goodbye cellphone plan. They can get away with that, too.
