[asterisk-users] Re: Sending SMS

[Gordon Henderson]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, Al Bochter wrote:

> I don't see why the cost to send SMS is around .15 each. What does the 
> gateway know that I don't know about sending the SMS.
> I just think .15 for each SMS send is high.  Or am I just over looking 
> something?

You're missing nothing; The telcos have us by the short & curlys. For 
them, it's money for old rope. They probably (in the UK at least) make 
many times more money through TXT messages than voice. The "base rate" 
here is about 12p a message. 12p for 160 bytes, or a single data packet 
over their network - which would be over £700 per MB. There are now "bolt 
ons" or additional packages depending on the network you're with - eg. 
with my contract I get up to 500 "free" TXTs a month. I know some people 
who send dozens a day here. (Especially young people - I think most 10 
year olds now have mobile phones!).

It's scandalous, but no-one challenged it when they first anounced it 
because we all thought it was fantastic! The best thing they ever did was 
for the 4 networks (in the UK) to agree to pass TXT messages between each 
other. That was some 6 or 7 years ago, maybe more, and that's when it 
really took off big time in the UK.

I doubt it'll ever change because "that's the way it's always been", and 
no-one is going to challenge them in a serious fashion. (And no-one else 
can afford to build up a network to make it possible!)

I've not really looked into the TXT sending business via landline in the 
UK, but I think it's basically a call to an 09xxx number - which are 
premium rate numbers, charging up to £1.50 a minute. Lets hope the 160 
byte packet gets sent in less than a minute!

The stats. are amazing too.  I looked at wholesale connection last year 
for a project. They had rates of up to a million messages a month. (do the 
sums and workout how many miuntes there are in a month...)

A quick search shows that in 2004, we in the UK were seding over 20 
billion TXT messages a year - Thats 75 million a day. Not bad for a 
population of 65 million... Who knows what the rate is today...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/22/uk_text_message_volumes_break/

Ah, that was 2004. Looks like we're almost doing that per month:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/26/uk_sms_record/

3.3 billion texts sent in May 2006...

Gordon