at 11/20/10 11:17AM
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I'm going off the wifi's for a week or so.
Happy Turkey Day everyone.
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Found this. Didn't want to wait. My, my.
From the Chicago Tribune. On text-messaging rates:
Consider the markup: SMS (short message service) texts are limited to 160 characters because they in effect piggyback on a secondary data channel necessary to coordinate voice communications. Computer science professor Srinivasan Keshav at the University of Waterloo in Ontario analyzed the numbers and testified before Congress last June that, even if you add in accounting, it only costs the carriers three-tenths of a cent to process a text. That's better than a 6,000 percent profit.
"Six hundred text messages contain less data than one minute of a phone call," testified Consumers Union policy analyst Joel Kelsey at that same hearing. If text data rates applied, he said, a brief cell conversation would cost customers $120.
In early 2008, astrophysicist Nigel Bannister of the University of Leicester in England calculated that for consumers to communicate by text costs 4.4 times more per byte that it costs scientists to communicate with the Hubble Space Telescope.