|
I think people have got to remember that SMS was originally a dirty hack on top of GSM. It was never designed with mass market appeal in mind and is an incredible inefficient way of sending data.
I know the British government actually set a maximum price of SMS in the UK originally, based on it's cost - 4p for the outbound message, 3p for the delivery report and then 3p profit and 2p tax. A total of 12p.
Since then, the cost to networks for sending SMS has decreased insignificantly but they've never directly passed on that saving to the customer. It's been a massive cash cow of the UK carriers, where 2.1 billion SMS are sent a year.
It's not all bad news though. Most contracts come with a decent number of messages bundled and not many people pay the direct cost of 10-12p per message.
|