How Your Cell Phone Company is Gouging You
I am willing to bet that I have done the math right and if so, your cell phone company is completely gouging you. Aside from minutes and the company telling who you can call and when, the text messaging is outrageous: but they are able to be discreet about it. How much is too much?Let’s say that you have an average plan and you text moderately. Moderately to me is about twice a day, but lets just say its 100 a month. What would that be with out any modifications and you paid for each one at 20 cents a message. That would put you up an extra $20 dollars a month. Close to 50% of your original bill…Thats a lot! But wait it gets worse.
The point of this exercise is to think about how much data you are transmitting. A text message is limited to 160 bytes. (Thats why Twitter has a limit at 140 characters.) So what are you paying to transmit a measly megabyte? About $1,250. Amazing huh? How much do you think it costs the cell phone company to transit a megabyte? A few pennies perhaps? I am not even going to bother calculating the percentage margin they get for that. See how they are able to sneak that past us?
I realize that many people have different plans and you might be paying 10 cents or maybe you pay $5 for unlimited text messages: Psst – its still a rip off.
- Even at 10 cents, you are paying $625 per megabyte.
- Even if you have unlimited text messages at $5, its still $312.50 (at an average of 100 a month) per megabyte.
You have to basically send thousands a day and break records to get your money’s worth. Now I have to ask: what are they doing with all that extra cash?
As a side note, I would like to point out that Senator Khol is looking unlawful text message practices. Also, take a look at these: New record claimed for text message & Dynamic duo attempt to break text messag record.
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Comments
I use Telstra in Australia and yesterday I received a bill for $9600 for a 3G wireless card. I only used it for 3 weeks. I guess I did not read the fine print on how much they charge once you go over the limit.
@Sammy: You make a good point about Cricket. when I was going over my numbers, I was only including the Big Ones, which if I remember, Cricket is not. My first cell phone was through Cricket though and I remember it was definitely more affordable, but only had regional coverage that pretty much only covered the city I was in (Albuquerque). So you are ahead of the game as far as I am concerned.
I have to say though: 97 TEXTS PER DAY? Holy monkey that is a lot! I hope some proportion of those are Tweets? Are those girls dating three times the number you are? Just kidding. I am glad you are getting the bang for your buck.
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I don’t know man.
I use cricket and spend $40 a month. Texting is part of the plan, not an add-on. I send roughly 97 texts per day, which puts me at just under 3000 texts a month outgoing. I receive three times that, making the total (and I’m really not an exceptional case here, the girls I date are much more prolific than I am) about 10,000 texts total per month. I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t especially feel ripped off at the moment; except on the phone itself, really, and that’s my own fault.