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NZ's outrageous SMS data rates

There's an interesting story on the wires this morning in which it's claimed that UK SMS rates are higher than the cost of downloading data from the orbiting Hubble space telescope.

According to Dr Nigel Bannister's calculations, it costs four times as much to send a character via SMS as it does to receive one from the Hubble.

Quite honestly, I think that Dr Bannister's calculations are extremely conservative, allowing 160 characters per message whereas I strongly suspect that the average SMS message is far shorter than the allowed maximum.

But if folks in the UK think they've got it bad, they really ought to pay a visit to New Zealand to see what really expensive SMS charges are.

Unless they're on a bundled plan, pommes pay around 5p per message which, at today's conversion rate, is around NZ$0.13. Compare that to the $0.20 per message that many Kiwis pay and you'll see just how expensive txt messaging is here.

Here in Godzone, those of us who aren't on one of those flat-rate txting plans are paying well over SIX times as much as it costs to download data from the Hubble -- and that's if we send the full 160 characters.

Send a more cryptic and concise message such as "CU4 lnch @12" and suddenly you're paying 86 times as much as you would to download star-data from the orbiting telescope.

Now that newswire story looks pretty wimpy doesn't it?

How about "Kiwi SMS traffic 80 times more expensive than Hubble downloads"?

Of course our mobile companies will immediately respond by dredging up some obscure dataset that proves that customers are actually *earning* money every time they send an SMS and that they're actually more benevolent than Mother Theressa.

Yeah, right.

But I really have to wonder how long Telecom and Vodafone can continue to justify such outrageous charges for what is a service that offers no guarantees of deliver, low priority (compared to voice) and very limited functionality.

But wait, it gets worse!

Just try sending an SMS to someone overseas!

Whereas it's possible to talk for an entire minute to someone in the UK for as little as $0.49, sending a few characters via SMS will cost you a whopping $0.30.

How does that work?

Voice calls demand realtime data transfer and a guaranteed minimum bandwidth.

An SMS message requires virtually no bandwidth and can be held until there is enough spare capacity to carry it.

So why are we pinged so heavily for a service that is so comparatively cheap to deliver?

Why can I send an email with a 1MB attachment to the UK virtually for free, yet pay $0.30 to send even a short "OK" to the same part of the world via SMS?

I'd love someone (are you there Paul) to justify these (gross over)charges.

I strongly suspect it's simply "what the market will bear".

Kiwis have been brought up in a market where extortionate mobile phone charges are the norm so they're used to being shafted by their cellphone companies.

So long as Vodafone and Telecom continue to operate their cosy cartel, there's nothing the consumer can do about it.

What a bunch of fools we all are.

Are you happy with the cost of SMS in NZ?

Are you on one of those flat-rate SMS plans or do you pay per message?

And how come the pricing difference between flat-rate and casual is so very high?

Is there room here for an alterative to SMS? Might there be real potential for a WiFi-based text-messaging service that operates outside the cellphone network?

Will the next generation of WiFi-enabled open-source mobiles effectively kill the SMS market anyway?

Oh, and by the way, here is a useful little "Made in NZ" currency calculator you can whack on your own website.

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