Text scam

Thanks, then, to John Gruber for pointing us to What Carriers Aren't Eager to Tell You About Texting, an article in the New York Times following Senator Herb Kohl's investigations into the price of text messages. It's American, obviously, but the technology will be global. Here's the bit that will make your jaw drop:

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: "Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn't."

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high -- spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what's called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That's why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment -- storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping -- and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. "Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume," he said. "It doesn't cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million."

In summary, text messages cost nothing to send, next to nothing to route and are extremely scalable. That we're being charged anything at all for them is incredible.

So here's my call to government. Mobile phone companies should be reclassified as data transporters in the same way ISPs are. Mobile devices (what we used to call "phones") send packets of data to them which they send to the right place, be it another device or the Internet. Voice calls are classified as just another form of data and are bundled in accordingly. As are text messages, making them essentially free. (Premium calls can be billed extra, but they already are so that's no big change.) Customers can then chose from a variety data packages that treat all the data coming in and out of their mobile devices as just that - data. And we'll all live happily ever after.

How does that sound?