SMS is highway robbery

I was talking to a president and vice president of a SUNY school I visited recently about math, slide rules, first generation HP calculators, etc.  The conversation trickled into interesting calculations.  I brought up this one I previously blogged about:

Your company is planning to move its data center from the west coast to the east coast of the U.S. (3000 miles) and you are assigned the project to determine the cheapest and quickest method of transport (electric or otherwise). The first method being considered is using a Boeing 747 with a cargo capacity of 20 tons. Determine the amount of data that can be moved using CD’s weighing 1 oz each that can store 500Mbytes each. Note the maximum transport speed of a fully loaded 747 is 500mph. The second method of transport is to determine the number of T1 circuits (use 1.0 M bit per second throughput) that are needed to equal the carrying capacity of the 747 within the same time period (flight time only). Full post.

I left the conversation hanging with the per gigabyte cost of an SMS message.  

TechCrunch had this calculation based on AT&T’s rates:

Today is basic math day at CrunchGear where we discovered that if 160 bytes of SMS data costs twenty cents then 1MB (1,048,576 bytes) of data would cost 131,072 cents, or $1,310.72.

The calculation is (1,048,576 /160)*.20.  This is assuming that you fill all 160 bytes on every message.  It also assumes a $ 0.20 cost.  Most carriers charge $ 0.10 per SMS (global average is $ 0.11), and I would expect the average text message is less than 160 bytes, lets say 120 bytes after your average out the “thx”, “rofl” and “lol”.  The new calculation is (1,048,576 /120)*.10 = $873.81 per megabyte.  (1,073,741,824/120)*.10 =  $894,784.85 per gigabyte.  Highway robbery!