NYT: What carriers aren’t eager to tell you about texting
December 28th, 2008
To most of us, sending a text message is magic. Simply enter your short message content, select a recipient, and send. From there, the message arrives in the recipient’s inbox to be read or ignored. For this privilege, wireless customers pay about $0.20/message unless they have a prepaid package. How the message pricing is determined is essentially a black art, and the subject of a recent NYT article (registration required).
The most interesting point in the article is that once the carrier costs are covered, it doesn’t matter if a tower conveys a hundred messages or a million. While revenue per message has been falling, the volume of messages has been skyrocketing and will continue to do so.