Stephen Coetzee

Had an interesting thought this morning. Everyone is so obsessed with the Short Messenging Service (SMS) and a great many people are impressed by Blackberry’s Messenger, which is exactly the same thing, instead it is much much cheaper, indeed many providers build that in so that the protocol is free. But all they have done is build a mutant form of email to which all blackberries connect, using a push type email service instead of polling a server ever few minutes.

At current rates, an SMS (or text, if you’re reading this in a country that does not use this term) in South africa will cost you 85c to a local number, and multiples of that if you’re sending internationally.

For simplicity’s sake we’re not working with bundles of any kind, which work out a lot cheaper, also not including the polling costs (where the phone regularly contacts the mail server, checking for new mail)

Lets say your SMS is a total of 160 characters (the limit on a single SMS I think), this works out to paying 0.53125c per character, as there are no overheads or they’re included in the price.

The cost of a single megabyte’s bandwidth in SA is R2.

Sending and receiving an email from my phone for the same amount of characters, came to close to 2 Kbytes, so at a cost of R2 for 1 Mbytes, it works out to 0,0002c per byte, and 0.4c per email (of 160 characters). Now you’d also have to pay to read the email so lets say that it will cost you 0.8c to send and receive a single email.

So you can either pay 85 cents to send and receive a single SMS, or

you can pay 85 cents to send and receive 106 emails.

Your choice