Is it me or am I the only one who feels ripped off by mobile phones? I am just looking at a phone for my youngest son, an offer by “3″ for ten pounds a month with unlimited texts and 75
minutes per month of calls. In itself a good bargain? It seems so but, I wonder how much profit is involved within that cost?
I decided to try and find out!
Texting…
Now this is the maths bit…nothing too difficuly but lets keep it as simple as we can.
A text message has a character limit of 160 letters, numbers or spaces as a space is, by definition, a keypress so its a “hidden” character. Each letter is 1k of data so ergo a message is a max of 160 kbs…that bit was easy.
Now 1 megabyte is 1024 kbs or 1024/160 = 6.4 text messages. For this purpose we will call it six to keep it simple.
Nowthere are 1024 megabytes in a Gigabyte so for ONE gig we can make 6 x 1024 texts or…6550 texts per Gig. With me so far? So where is this going…
Well I have a download limit with Talk Talk of 40 Gb’s per month which they charge as an extra on the bill of £6.99 over and above my line rental and calls. So for £7.00 I can have 40GB’s of data transfer.
So 40 x 6550= 262000 texts for seven quid! Or as my calculator works it out to: 2.6717557251908396946564885496183e-5 per text!! Which means nothing to me!
Now rummaging around on the net I can see pay as you go texts are around 5p to your own company eg Virgin to Virgin, Orange to Orange, but that doubles to 10 p across companies.
Using the above “262000 texts for seven quid” scenario our 262000 texts would cost us, at the 5p rate… 262000 x .05 =£13,100 now I think that that is a tad expensive!
So lets go on holiday and see what it costs to text home to the folks saying “Its nice here, suns out, beers nice, food great, see you in two weeks!”
Looking on the ne
t again I can see that it can cost up to 49 pence per text from abroad to home…so thats….262000 x £0.49 =£128,380 for my 40Gbs of data…NOT £7!!
So now we know how they make there money! I wish I knew what it was from calls but it will be similar I am sure.
Now before you all rush to the keyboard to have a go and say but this, but that…I know that they have an infrastructure to build and maintain, employees and equipment but that was just on 40 Gig…now how much is it when you extrapolate that over all subscribers to a network?
I suspect the final figure would make the National Lottery seem like peanuts!
Moriarty…
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one character is one “byte” or “8 bits” now that means for 40 GB of Texts is (1024*1024*1024*40/160 = 1,677,721.6 Texts). (1024 bytes in a kilobyte, 1024 Kilobytes in a megabyte, 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte, 40 gigabytes on his plan, 160 bytes per a full text.
Bl**dy hell! That makes it WORSE!! Thanks for the input…that makes the whole scenario even more disgusting…
Moriarty…