Given that a GPS phone call uses about 14kbps, sending one SMS shouldn't cost any more than calling someone for 1/11th of a second, should it? 3c per SMS is equivalent to charging $19.80 per minute for a call.

I'm sure there are other overheads but I find it hard to believe that 3c per SMS covers nothing more than "rising costs" of providing SMS service.

meethinks the merkins should just get over this. Paying for an incoming message is just plain silly. Would be like only supporting collect calling.

SMSing is just a plain rip off. We worked out recently that it costs about £500 per megabyte when SMSing, and the profit margin on this industry is about 90% (at least in 2006 anyway, and the industry has grown further since then). The phone industry could drop their prices dramatically and still make a decent profit but we are currently living in a rip off society where industry is fleecing its customers until they are forced to stop.

"but in the USA contracts specify an allowance of voice minutes and text messages, with deductions made for both outgoing and incoming communications"

Minor correction, they usually do. US Cellular for sure has free incoming texts and calls, and a few other smaller cell companies have free incoming for at least one or the other.

"Given that a GPS phone call uses about 14kbps"... (I assume you mean GSM) a CDMA call actually averages about 6kbps. The "old" CDMA codec was 13kbps fixed, and the newer ones are 8.5kbps full rate, with half, quarter, 1/8th and "null" rates available. (Quarter, 1/8th and null are for giving the call some background noise when the person's not talking). In the US, due to AT&T's crazy amounts of half rate codec usage, the GSM calls probably average about 6kbps on their GSM network as well (although they are using full rate only on 3G for now.) This of course doesn't invalidate the point, SMS rates here are through the roof!

It sounds like this sucks to me, I'm not at all for driving useful SMS services out of the market. I have kind of wondered what the business model WAS for some of these free SMS services though.. do twitter, 4info, etc., manage to answer your question AND squeeze and ad into 160 chars, or how do they get any revenue whatsoever?

SMS should cost a fortune. Like national/state lotteries they are effectively a tax on the stupid/tech non-savvy.

Get with the wave. VOIP over free wi-fo where you can. Email and IM where you can. Keep as much traffic as possible off the mobile phone network. Remember, a call will cost less than a text for the amount of information it contains. And calls can be kept transactional - start with the phrase "this is costing me money, so I'll keep it to the point". Sending an email via your mobile will cost less than a text. It works for me. I've a PAYG phone and an Asus laptot and between them, call charges of less than £25 per year. And I do go abroad, and I am on the move a lot.

Txting is for retards anyway. It's destroying the English language. And txters smell of wee.

"big rises in the cost of text messaging over the last few years"

I have rarely seen a statement more mysterious. Are SMSCs racks now made of pure Gold? Did an unexpected change in the universal constant Alpha demand an extreme increase in Joule per Bit transmitted? Do Telcos have to pay for all the message analysis crap the Three-Letter-Agencies put in the exchange room? What is it?

Compared to the bandwidth necessary for phone calls, SMS use about zero.

There are things Merkins do better than Europeans, but phone billings is NOT one of them. For example, suppose you see in an ad a mobile phone plan for $20 a month. When you examine the fine print, you see it means:

$20 per month for the "plan" itself

$7 per month for "network access fee" (needed to make phone calls)

$1 per month for "emergency number service" (to be able to call 911, and you have to take it)

$5 per month for a voicebox

$5 per month for caller ID (Also in order to cover the huge needs of bandwidth of the service)

With sales taxes and some more mysterious additions, you find the real cost is $45 a month...