The Idiocy of Text Messaging

Right on the heels of the widely circulated story of Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) querying cell phone providers asking for justification for their text messaging rates—which, by his calculations, comes in at about $1,310.72 per megabyte (MiB)—I was engaged in a not-brief exchange of text messages myself (which, the nature of the beast being what it is, was repeated later). I couldn’t help but think that this was sheer madness on my part, but—geek that I am—I needed to crunch some numbers.

Doing the Math

Let’s break down some numbers. Since I don’t use a phone all that much, I find it more economical to use a pre-paid plan. My text messages come in at 10¢ per message incoming & outgoing. At 1,048,576/160 (1MiB/160B) * 0.10 (price per message), we get $655.36 per MiB. But that’s not exactly true. I almost never use EXACTLY 160 characters in a message.  Sometimes it’s just one letter. If all of my messages were only 1 character, then the cost would be 1MiB/1 * 0.10 which equals $104,857.60 per MiB. So the truth is likely somewhere in the middle…let’s say at something less than half…about 70 characters, which gives us $1,497.97 per MiB, which we’ll round up to $1,500. (By way of contrast, I get 250GiB per month from my ISP for $46.00/mo…or 0.00018¢ per MiB.)

Let’s put our hard hats on and start spelunking for some data. If our average word length is the standard 5-bytes+1btye (characters plus space/punctuation), that mean that our $1,500 buys us 174,763 words (seems like a lot), or about 116.5 words per dollar (not seeming like quite as much, now).

Now, let’s switch over to voice. The average American English speaker talks at a rate of about 150 words per minute (give or take). The cost of a one minute voice call for me is 15¢…and that translates to 6 2/3 minutes per dollar or, if we convert minutes to spoken words, then we get about 1,000 words per dollar. This is more than eight and a half times more data per dollar than text messaging. Plus, it’s easier to interact and is less time-consuming as well.

The Idiocy Part

Here’s the thing…as I’m exchanging some expensive words with someone else, I happen to know that the odds are pretty good that they just happen to be holding in their hands a working phone. And yet we still don’t call each other even when it’s clear that the exchange via texting isn’t going to be brief. (I’m waiting to read a really good Ph.D. thesis on why this is.)

Yes, there are times when texting is better. Because it’s slower, a person is able to multi-task and hold a conversation with someone in person while also engaging in a text communication. Sometimes the need for quiet is paramount (in which case, I hope the quiet one remembered to turn of their ringtone). Sometimes you just need/want to have a record of the exchange…something that has long been absent from voice communication. And sometimes one or the other of the parties just is more comfortable texting than phone talking.

I do hope Senator Kohl manages to shake the right trees and get texting costs down a bit. They are a little high. If it’s a usage thing….

From the time I hit send for a message until it’s confirmed sent, takes a few seconds…I’ll be generous and say five. That means from a time-usage standpoint, it takes only 1/12 of a minute per message. At 15¢ per minute that would be (again being generous) just 2¢ per message. This new $300 per MiB still seems rather steep, but it would be a step in the right direction. R U w me?