Text messaging malarky
TELUS Mobility and Bell Mobility are screwing Canadians and are also lying about it in the process. In an announcement made earlier this week, both carriers plan to charge users $0.15 per received message instead of not charging at all.
This is of course totally unfair to those who do not have any text messaging packages on their service plans already, and it basically punishes anyone who receives a text message whether or not they want to receive any to begin with.
I had a good laugh when I read this in the attached article:
Shawn Hall of Telus in Vancouver said the cost of accommodating text messaging has ballooned in recent years.
"Canadians send 45 million text messages a day," said Hall. "That has created a tremendous strain on our network and we can no longer afford to provide the service for free."
Anyone who has a clue about networking knows that this is complete bullshit. If you're familiar with computer measurement terms, here's a demonstration of why text messaging is a drop in a bucket compared to voice calls.
The average text message is probably around 70 characters, but if you include headers, it probably works out to 120 (the max characters for any message is 160). This means that about 120 bytes is transferred from handset to handset when a text message is made.
| Messages/day: | 45,000,000 |
| Avg. msg. bytes: | 120 |
| Total msg. data/day: | 5.03 GB |
Now, 5 GB is quite a lot. In fact, the largest iPod Nano is at 8 GB, so that is indeed a lot of text data. However, it is nowhere near as much data as a voice call. A typical voice call is about 3 minutes, and depending on the carrier, each call runs about 9.6 to 12 kilobits per second (an MP3 typically has about 160 or so).
Let's assume that about 19,000,000 calls are made in Canada on a mobile phone. We'll use an average of 11 Kbps for the call quality as that is a decent ballpark average.
| Avg. call (seconds): | 180 |
| Bitrate (Kbps): | 11 |
| Calls/day: | 19,000,000 |
| GB/day: | 4,484.65 |
| TB/day: | 4.38 |
As you can see, text messaging is less than 0.5% of the total data than that the average daily calls generate. Most cell phone companies charge about $0.07 per minute for going over your allotment of minutes per month and yet somehow TELUS and Bell are claiming that the lack of charges are costing them a fortune in bandwidth.
This is just the two companies being greedy and nothing but. These numbers prove that they're a bunch of bullshitters.