thomasng [dot] net a nerds life. changing things one byte at a time.

Cost of text messaging vs E-mail.

So I just got a text messaging plan after having a cell phone for the last 8 years. Being nerdy, I calculated the cost of texting vs just using internet e-mail. Let’s assume that there is no protocol overhead for e-mailing or texting and that what you only send is pure text.

My Comcast bill is approximately $55/month. Comcast recently announced that one can use a total aggregate bandwidth of 250GB per month before reaching their monthly limit. At this rate, the price per character is $2.05 x 10^-10 (that’s $2.05 billionth of a dollar per *character*… a very very small number.)

The math:
($55.00 month / 250GB) * (1GB / 2^30 bytes) = $0.000000000205 / byte.
(1 byte = one 8-bit ASCII character – e.g. A-Z, 0-9 and punctuation)

On the other hand, my text messaging service costs $5.00 / month. You get 400 *total* text messages, with 140 characters each. Lets assume that every text message that you send and receive is 140 characters long… even though the average text message is much shorter. At this rate, the price per character is $0.0000893.

The math:
($5.00 month / 400 messages) * (1 message / 140 bytes) = $0.0000893 / byte.
(1 byte = one 8-bit ASCII character – e.g. A-Z, 0-9 and punctuation)

So, if Comcast charges the same amount as your phone carrier for the same amount of service, it would cost you $23,971,286 per month.

The math:
($0.0000893 / byte) * (1 byte / [1/2^30] GB) * 250GB = $23,971,286.

Yes … almost $24 MILLION dollars a month.