What's in a SMS message? The real cost & just how badly you're being ripped off

http://www.techvibes.com/blog/whats-in-a-text-message-the-real-cost-of-sms-and-just-how-badly-wireless-carriers-are-ripping-you-off-2011-07-05

by vantech • 15 years ago

115 100 15 years ago

techvibes.com

jws2• 15 years ago

Not that the telcos aren't plundering the citizens, but the SMS messages do travel in a special channel that let's you get them in a timely manner without killing your battery. It has rather small bandwidth compared to the entire cell, and that scarcity for premium functionality should cost more.

That said, AT&T takes so long to deliver a text between my family that they may as well just poll infrequently in the regular channels.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

Scarcity? What? Text messages are sent using idle channels that are not busy at the moment. It's only a scarce resource in the case that the available channels become saturated, in which case the provider has no qualms about simply dropping your text message.

ismarc• 15 years ago

You're misinformed about the channels that are used. It's actually the control channels that carry the SMS messages (the channels used for association to towers) not the voice channels. These channels can easily become heavily utilized with a large number of connected calls or devices associated to a single tower. Additionally, the message isn't dropped, it's instead queued for later delivery which typically occurs when your device migrates to a different tower.

jws2• 15 years ago

Text messages are sent in the signaling channel, this is the channel that tells your cell phone it has a call and other stuff interesting only to telephones. The advantage here is your phone is always listening to that channel.

SMS is sent during idle spots in that channel, but it is a very limited channel and you couldn't run large amounts of data through it, there just isn't enough idle time.

Scarce idle time sounds oxymoronic, but it is only idle in the sense that it isn't connecting and disconnecting phone calls.

GrooveStomp3• 15 years ago

And that's why I'm on a $10/mo unlimited data plan, which naturally includes text messaging as "data".

Qz• 15 years ago

Wait -- how?

GrooveStomp3• 15 years ago

Just replied to zobzu: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2737343

zobzu2• 15 years ago

what carrier/country?

aikinai2• 15 years ago

I'm not the parent, but if you were grandfathred in (or I've heard there are tricks to get it from scratch) T-Mobile has a $5 unlimited data plan (in the US). It doesn't include texting, but you can just use Google Voice.

GrooveStomp3• 15 years ago

Mobilicity in Canada. Coverage isn't great, but hopefully it improves. Fido used to have terrible coverage in Canada, but they've worked some kind of deal with the other carriers, so their coverage is now much better. Here's a price guide: http://mobilicity.ca/plans/ I do the basic $25/mo plan, then $10/mo for unlimited cross-country calling (for family) and another $10/mo for unlimited data.

corin_• 15 years ago

  the cost of SMS is determined by how much consumers can be persuaded to pay

Correct, that's what happens in a free market. Since when are businesses supposed to price according to the cost of what they are selling? Their job is to make a profit, and the best way to do that is to find the balance between the highest cost and getting as many people as possible to pay that price.

Not to mention that SMS messages being more expensive than they could be is hardly a new fact, and indeed is written about often enough that it has been on HN multiple times in the last year alone.

lukeschlather• 15 years ago

Wireless is in no way a free market. It is tightly regulated with monopolies granted to the highest bidder.

rapind• 15 years ago

Exactly. I'm all for a free market in this space. With margins this high, everyone would get into it.

ghshephard• 15 years ago

You see this type of article design pattern frequently: "You are being ripped off - Product A costs Company B a maximum of C Dollars on the margin, and they are charging you D Dollars, which is many orders of magnitude larger than C"

The common rebuttal is: "You are making the mistake of calculating on the Margin, you forgot to calculate E Fixed Costs"

But, I think of it somewhat differently:

It is rarely the case that you _have_ to use Product A at Price D, but you still do, which means it usually has more value to you than Price D - and is it that unreasonable that Company B should charge it's customers what their customers value product A at?

I know I would.

As a side note - I've managed to get most of the people I SMS with frequently into using WhatsApp, and, once I see that I've sent less than 100 SMS messages for at least three or four months, I'll shift it over to my Data Plan.

Apple will likewise have simliar impacts when they bring their SMS alternative online.

So - the free market does respond to this in a semi predictable and reasonable manner.

burke• 15 years ago

I think the real problem here is all the regulatory and financial barriers to competing in the telecomm arena. The free market has a hard time sorting itself out when there are so few players.

I don't have a solution to propose, but this is my observation.

InclinedPlane2• 15 years ago

This.

However, there is a difference between bulk, wholesale costs and individual retail costs, and prices. SMS is hardly the one and only example of high markup goods in history. Indeed, there are a plethora of entire industries in the same boat. Consider toys, many toys cost a few percent of their in-store retail prices, but again those costs are in bulk at wholesale. The same applies to batteries. And everyone knows about the huge markups in furniture and mattresses. The best advice is to find alternatives or shop around. If you just give in and accept the price that means you've declared you value the good you receive higher than the price you're paying for it (and in many cases SMS's are worth as much as people are paying).

gnoupi• 15 years ago

In France you have 3 main players (and some little ones using their networks, but that doesn't really count). They were already condemned for some "secret" agreements on prices (http://www.cellular-news.com/story/15060.php).

A fourth operator is in process of entering the market, but it has had a lot of difficulties already. The 3 main actors really did all they could to slow the process down and even try to have the government refuse the license to the new one.

Their main reason? The new "challenger" is Free.fr. These are the same ones who pulled the internet market in France. The ones who came and proposed a free dialup access (minus communication costs), when all other actors were still on "3 hours + comm costs" kind of deals. The ones who pushed the ADSL market to lower prices for more service, and introduced the concept of "triple play" (you get a special router from the ISP, and you get free TV and phone calls added to the regular internet) ( http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox , the English page is lacking, though ). They forced the other actors (roughly the same ones as the mobile telecom) to come up with the same offers for about the same prices.

So that's why they did everything they could to prevent Free from entering the mobile market. By fear of the same kind of thing happening.

Free.fr managed to get their license though, and are in the process of establishing their antenna network. So we will see what will be, when they will really start, and announce their mobile deals.

runn1ng• 15 years ago

Exactly.

Phone operators are NOT a free market. In every country, operators are heavily regulated and only three or four operators form a majority.

hammock• 15 years ago

That's the right track. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_cost

Calculating marginal cost+a portion of fixed cost tells you what it costs the cell carrier. But that's the wrong side of the equation to be looking at.

Mkt transactions happen when the cost of something overlaps with what someone is willing to pay for it.

And exactly how much someone is willing to pay for something is defined as the value of their next best alternative. In the case of texting, it could be the hassle of setting up all their friends WhatsApp, or typing in email addresses into their contact book, or something like that. (Also throw in a wee bit of behavioral economics, time discounting etc ) And that's why you get a bunch of people (myself included) willing to pay the $5 or whatever a month for unlimited SMS.

Also to clarify usually when people try to measure "how much you are getting ripped off" they are looking at the difference between the two sides of the equation above (cost, and price-what you pay) which is not always the best way to do it but it does give some indication of consumer/producer surplus. You might feel like you're getting ripped off but that's a judgment call are you really? You currently pay $5 a month for unlimited but I bet you'd be willing to pay 6 or $ if you had to. So really you are getting a deal, saving yourself at least $2 a month what they could be charging you if they knew your max reserve price.

danssig• 15 years ago

>The common rebuttal is: "You are making the mistake of calculating on the Margin, you forgot to calculate E Fixed Costs"

An even better rebuttal is: "Price is not: (what it costs) + 1, it is the perceived value of the product/service. Costs have nothing to do with it besides deciding the pricing floor".

gmac• 15 years ago

In an economics textbook, yes. But in reality people have a notion of fairness, and this influences behaviour. For example, see this American Economic Review paper: http://www.lrz.de/~u516262/webserver/webdata/rabin1993_incor...

Anecdotally, this kind of what-it-costs consideration certainly influences my behaviour.

For instance, Easyjet doesn't pre-allocate seats on its planes, and offers 'speedy boarding' for something like £15 ($25). This means you get to board before those who didn't buy it (and, incidentally, sets up a game theoretic-type problem, in that it's only worth buying if enough others don't buy).

Irrespective of the value of this to me, I on principle never buy it. In fact, the very fact that they offer to take £15 off my hands for something that's transparently and utterly free to them lowers my opinion of them as a company.

(Note: obviously the price is set to engineer scarcity -- it wouldn't work if they charged £1 -- and from a rational/economic perspective it's a brilliant little wheeze).

vyrotek• 15 years ago

I hate being ripped off just as much as the next guy...

But, I don't think showing the cost of SMS is the right way to fix the market. Guess what, there are a lot of things in this world that you buy with ridiculous mark ups.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

What exactly is the harm in informing people?

michaelfairley• 15 years ago

"You've found market price when buyers complain but still pay." - pg

olihb• 15 years ago

Only if you lower the price (within reason) and you don't get more customers...

People were buying cars before Ford, but more people bought them when they got cheaper.

dfox2• 15 years ago

Only when you lower the price and get more profit as you can easily get more customers but actually lose money in process.

jfruh• 15 years ago

I'm always amused when tech types (who tend to lean libertarian) act so outraged when something they purchase doesn't correspond to costs + some "fair" markup. (People seem particularly fixated on the prices of ebooks and text messages, for some reason.) Do you want to question the basis of capitalism and the free market? I'm all for it! But if you don't, don't complain when companies charge what the market will bear. Don't hate the players, hate the game.

jseliger• 15 years ago

I think the objection here is to the cell phone market, which more resembles a cross between an oligopoly and a cartel than a free market. You only have a handful of players and giant barriers to entry, so it's not easy to send a real signal about your unhappiness or choose an alternative.

orangecat• 15 years ago

Exactly. And there's obvious collusion, as when all the carriers raised text messaging prices nearly simultaneously a few years ago.

krschultz• 15 years ago

A "free market" doesn't necessarily lead to a bunch of competitors. Everyone has this picture of a free market with 20 competitors and low prices, but a free market doesn't always work out that way. A couple of years ago we had a bunch of cell phone companies to choose from, but they keep merging because the infrastructure costs kill the small players. A small part of that is regulation, but most of it is just the intrinsic cost of building and maintaining a telecom network.

dlsspy2• 15 years ago

Wow. I feel violated.

grabs water bottle

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

Water bottles are great. Way better than those absurdly overpriced bottles of water!

(Odd how one ordering of the two words seems to imply to me a sort of reusable bottle made of heavy plastic or metal while the other ordering implies those cheap plastic bottles of water that often times cost as much as the reusable ones anyway).

dlsspy2• 15 years ago

Heh. I didn't read it that way. I thought you meant a block of ice with a hole in it.

My sigg has been beaten near death. Horribly dented, etc... I'll keep using it as long as it keeps holding water. Then I'll get a new one and take it snowboarding for a while.

zobzu2• 15 years ago

when ive got my first mobile phone, in the 90's, SMS were actually free. one day they decided they could ask money for it. the rest is history.

I wonder how much really cost internet data traffic however.

jonhohle• 15 years ago

They first started charging for sending, receiving remained free for several years (I used my phone as a pager from 2001-2003). Then they started charging both sides of the transaction.

It would be nice if they at least only charged different accounts. Texting anyone on my family plan means I pay for both sides.

DanI-S• 15 years ago

If SMS was always free, but plans cost $5 more than they do now, would anyone even notice or complain?

angus77• 15 years ago

??? You think nobody would complain if their phone bill went up?!

noselasd3• 15 years ago

If SMS was free, I would probably complain about all the spam I would get.

forgotusername• 15 years ago

This is just repeating the same old crap that is completely devoid of anything but the most abstract high level concepts of how these things work.

I can't claim to be any expert, but I know at least that in GSM a handset must be allocated a dedicated control channel from a limited number of timeslots in the current cell for the duration of an SMS transaction. This happens on the receiving and transmitting ends. In order to establish said channel, the handset is first woken up through paging, which places load on another shared channel.

For each physical frequency, there are only something like 16-24 slots available. For each physical station, there may only be handful of frequencies in use, perhaps only one.

Installation of a base station is not cheap. In a busy metropolitan area with even 100 teenagers getting upset because their SMS failed to go through the first time they tried to send it (and repeatedly pumping send until it finally works), at least make a guess at the math involved for infrastructure costs to support this kind of thing. Don't forget to factor in the load it places on the random paging channels shared with voice signalling (again, more investment in physical frequencies to reduce error rates here).

In short, I wish someone who actually understood this stuff wrote some kind of rebuttal, the rhetoric is clearly at least a few parts bullshit.

Don't try to imagine this using some analogy like tiny UDP packets being spat out on a packet switched network, that's not what these networks look like. Transaction time is on the order of seconds, which requires a "physical" circuit to be setup beforehand.

Yes, sending SMS would be practically free on the Internet, but that's comparing apples to oranges.

leot• 15 years ago

But they didn't put the infrastructure up to support SMS. They put it up to support voice calls, primarily.

elektronaut• 15 years ago

If it's any indication on the informedness of the article:

  In reality, an MMS is about one million times more data than a text message.

The payload of an SMS is 140 bytes. The MMS specification does not specify a limit, but providers often cap it at 300kb. Which, of course, is about 2000 times more.

Now, if an MMS had about a million times more data than a text message, that would make each message about 140 megabytes.

sorbus• 15 years ago

The article seems to have updated. It now reads "In reality, an MMS or email is anywhere from a thousand to a hundred thousand times more data than an SMS." Given that the previous paragraph says that it's an "email containing photo(s) and/or video(s)", that seems perfectly reasonable (it puts the range between ~140 KB and ~14 MB).

pyre7• 15 years ago

The price of what unlimited text messages should cost aside, the ala carte pricing of text messages (at least for US cell carriers) is definitely price gouging. It cost (at least at one point) ~25c to receive a text message. And I have received spam text messages. This creates a perverse incentive to the carrier to do nothing to block spammers on their SMS network.

Also, my wife has a pay-as-you-go plan and each text that she sends or receives counts as a minute of talk time. I have a hard time believing that setting up circuit from one end of the text to the other takes the same amount of resources as a minute of talk time. Shouldn't a minute of talk time also take up a circuit? Wouldn't a text occupy that circuit for a fraction of a minute?

WA• 15 years ago

This, by the way, is specific for the US. In Germany, and I believe in almost any other European country, only the sender pays for SMS and calls. I spent a year in the US and this was something I found quite irritating - being charged for receiving a call.

fertel• 15 years ago

While this was true - all the of major US carriers are moving to SMS-IP solutions as they move to 4g.

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

Why do people keep texting? Everyone I know uses a smartphone that could be utilizing free data via Google Voice, not to mention there is iMessage, Huddles and other cross platform alternatives that are cheaper and technologically superior to SMS.

robryan• 15 years ago

I think it's down to either plan structure, compatability, not knowing a better way or lazyness. In my case the best plan I can get an iPhone 4 on on a good network just so happens to include unlimited text.

noselasd3• 15 years ago

Chicken and egg problem ? None of my friends are using any of the smartphone bundled programs/services. Thus I can't send them messages by other than SMS.

Once you go down the path of using one of these other services, there's a standarization problem. I'd go nuts after a while if I had to juggle Google Talk, MSN, Huddles, or even fiddle with setup to make the multi protocol messaging applications play nice.

SMS is ubiquitous, and just works.

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

Sure you can, Google Voice or one of its competitors (important since Voice is US-only).

aroon• 15 years ago

How much something costs is not the same as how much it is worth.

pyre7• 15 years ago

True, but people tend to get a little irritated when the price is jacked up by what amounts to a government-sanctioned cartel. "Voting with your money" has little to no effect.

numlocked• 15 years ago

As a group of software developers, I suspect there won't be much sympathy found here. You shouldn't price at cost+, but rather at value+. Many of us work on SaaS solutions, which have little to no marginal cost, yet we charge for the service.

xorglorb• 15 years ago

> Many of us work on SaaS solutions, which have little to no marginal cost, yet we charge for the service.

The cost of programmers to create the product, the cost of servers, system admins, etc. Those aren't small costs.

neilc• 15 years ago

> Those aren't small costs.

No, but they are largely fixed costs, not marginal ones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost

pyre7• 15 years ago

But what are the fixed costs of SMS? It's traveling over a network that was initially built to carry voice traffic, and is currently expanding to carry data traffic. How much of the network was built specifically for SMS? It really seems like it was something shoehorned into existing infrastructure. I have a hard time coming up with the fixed costs of SMS (at the carrier level; You could always add the cost of phone makers to build in support, but that's not the carrier's job).

chappar• 15 years ago

Unlike voice, SMS will be stored in a server and in case your mobile is switched off you will still get the message, when you switch on your phone. So, there will be bit extra cost for maintaining these servers.

kerryfalk• 15 years ago

Cost != value.

To the consumer cost to the company providing the product/service is irrelevant. What really matters is the value you extract for the price you pay.

Some products need to be sold at a loss for anyone to consider purchasing them, some are sold at a loss to get you to buy other products from the same company, and some are sold with significant margins. None of these situations really matter to the consumer, do they? All that matters is that I'm getting X and am willing to pay Y. If I can pay .5Y, then that's great I just earned myself a deal. I may not want to pay 1.5Y though.

So from a consumer perspective... I don't understand "how badly you're being ripped off". As an entrepreneur though I read that and think, potential opportunity. Any product/service that has extremely large margins has potential for competition and profits. For a short time at least, until the race to zero makes it less compelling to compete any longer.

kirvyteo• 15 years ago

I agree. Part of the value is that it is a default application in every phone. My previous startup provides an SMS gateway that sending 500K messages each year to mostly SE Asia receivers (small amount compared to what other providers do) Even now although data plans are getting cheaper and more common, there are still a lot people NOT carrying IPhones, Androids, BB etc. If you want a ubiquitous push notification mechanism, SMS is still the only app. And maybe part of the reasons why the author is ranting about this is because when I compare SMS rates across different countries, US users are paying quite a premium for SMS as compared to Asia or SE Asia where I am located.

pyre7• 15 years ago

Canadians are paying a premium too.

aneth• 15 years ago

I suppose 37 Signals and Adobe are ripping off their customers as well because their marginal cost is close to zero and they are charging... more than zero.

Actually, I agree SMS is a ripoff, but the marginal cost isn't why. It's a ripoff because it's something people want and there is no other way for them to get it, which is an effective monopoly. With Google Voice and other competitors gaining adoption on smarter phones, I expect this to change.

CognitiveLens• 15 years ago

This. Let's remove all of the technical arguments and just put it this way: even if the telcos were using magic to transmit messages, which is theoretically free, I would still be willing to pay them $5-$10/month for them to perform that magic, because contacting my friends through texts is worth that to me - I have no cheaper way of getting that exact service and ultimately it's worth what they are charging, to me.

The monopoly argument does resonate, however, and I agree that introducing competition is a great advance.

Do people feel that self-sustaining websites are a ripoff because the creators no longer have to put in any time or effort to earn revenue?

tsotha4• 15 years ago

Who pays by the text? Don't most plans include a large number of free SMS messages?

Besides, this guy's analysis is very flawed. For one thing, SMS messages don't take the same path as data. They can't, since so many people (still) don't have smart phones. Also, the idea that because one kilobyte costs x that one byte ought to cost x/1024 completely ignores setup and fixed costs.

maxxxxx• 15 years ago

AT&T plans don't include any free messages

pyre7• 15 years ago

What are the fixed costs for SMS? Aren't they using infrastructure that was setup for the voice network? Can you really call the cost of setting up a new cell tower a 'fixed cost' of SMS (i.e. doesn't it also carry data and voice)?

tsotha4• 15 years ago

Well, the money has to come from somewhere. You say SMS uses infrastructure that was set up for the voice network. But you could just as easily have said voice uses infrastructure that was set up for the SMS network, which would make SMS a bargain and voice overpriced.

Mobile carriers put enormous amounts of money into their infrastructure. Billions and billions, on top of the tens of billions they paid for spectrum. And they're not charities, so one way or another all that's going to get billed to customers, whether it's voice minutes, SMS, data, or plans with bulk minutes/messages/MB.

Derbasti• 15 years ago

Did you know that data being sent as a text message is several orders of magnitude more expensive than sending data to the hubble space telescope (about $8 per Mb)?

vacri3• 15 years ago

Sensationalist crap. If the costs to to the company to send a thousand text messages is a penny and they're charging $5 for it, then they're getting a 50,000% profit. You'd think that investors would be car-bombing each other for returns like that.

'Greatest ongoing con job'? Really? When the US housing con job was exposed, the world economy tumbled. SMS con job exposed... people shrug and go on.

I find it somewhat ironic that on a site dedicated to "find a niche and exploit it", there comes this article screaming 'bloody murder!' about business providing a service for a price above the bare bones wholesale cost.

pistoriusp2• 15 years ago

Most of my friends are now using app phones. So we communicate with apps rather than SMS.

Most of the time when I get a SMS it's when someone is trying to sell me something I don't want.

billybob2• 15 years ago

Isn't that infuriating? The carrier is literally selling you spam: they charge you to receive that spam message. They could provide a whitelisting service, which would be technically simple to implement and would solve the problem completely. But they have incentive not to.

pistoriusp2• 15 years ago

I'm in South Africa, so we've never had to pay to receive text messages, just to send. But it's crazy expensive.

tylerneylon• 15 years ago

A deep problem seems to be a high barrier-to-entry for would-be competing carriers. If it was easy to start a business that charged rates people were happier with, someone would do it, and make a good deal of money. As things currently are, there's no real incentive for carriers to change -- they get away with it because consumers don't have a choice.

tsotha4• 15 years ago

That barrier is impossibly high, at least in the US, because there's a constrained resource involved: spectrum. I suspect it's quite literally impossible to start a nationwide carrier at this point without congressional action to reallocate frequency bands from some other use.

bxc3• 15 years ago

I think the main rage people get here is when they get data on their phone and so can make a much more of a "like-for-like" comparison between various means of delivering 132 characters delivered to/from a mobile device.

I mean of the user experience, not of the very different backend networks in place.

trezor• 15 years ago

Crosspost of my post on reddit on why these analyses are flawed (from http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/hu4l1/apples_ime... ):

SMS is "expensive" anywhere in the world when counting $s/byte, it's not just the US. The reason is that you cannot simply do price comparison based on data-rates: it's a flawed top-level down approach ignoring very real concerns and constraints.

The reason for SMS being relatively expensive per byte is that it's actually a hack which allows us to send data over the global GSM control channel, not a regular phone-allocated voice/data-channel. This makes it's main carrier a very bandwidth constrained channel and SMS is second class traffic sent on a as-available basis, but with queued on demand push-reception for the recipient.

Your data-traffic however has a dedicated channel, realtime priority, and realtime constraints, and it would need to go trough a intermediate service which can queue it if the receiver is not there. And the recipient would have to have an always on data-connection polling for incoming messages, draining your battery, much like Email push-notification does on modern smartphones.

In other words: Data and SMS are fundamentally different services, operating with fundamentally different channels and technologies. Your OSI-minded application-level analysis is incomplete.

True, this might not make much difference to the end-user of the service provided, but there are technical reasons for why SMS and data is treated and priced differently.

As long as SMS is a defined standard as it is now, and that standard involves piping shit trough the GSM control channel and not using data (something you don't want when roaming abroad), the fact that they are priced differently is perfectly reasonable. If the price-difference itself is reasonable is another debate all together.

ThomPete• 15 years ago

The number I heard being said by people in the industry is SMS 150000 times and voice 1500 times.

pwaring• 15 years ago

"prices for individual text messages on pay-as-you-go plans have quadrupled from an average of 5 cents to 20 cents"

Really? In the UK they've stayed static at about 10-12p for at least ten years (for a 'standard' text on a PAYG plan, assuming no extras which give you reduced rates on texts to certain people etc.). We're also not charged for receiving standard texts (there can be a charge for premium ones, but not everyone can send those).

Swannie• 15 years ago

Yes. In the UK, as with most of the world, we embraced text messaging (12years ago I was txting every day). In the USA, this took a lot longer, with phones often note supporting SMS.

noselasd3• 15 years ago

I guess it all depends on who you are. Some international carriers I've worked with, handling SMSs is a net loss to them - but they have to do it(as a side offer to gain customers for services they do make money on, mostly voice traffic, and because they're lawfully bound to do it as they're operating a country's international SS7 border gateway).

Also, telco equipment isn't cheap. All those tens of thousands radio towers, exchanges, cables cost arms and legs. They have to make that money somewhere. Though, I've no doubt someone's getting far richer on your SMSs than what would be sensible. Entering this market is a huge barrier - you need expensive equipment, you need licenses, you need interconnection arrangement with other carriers, and you often need to build up a physical network. Thus, few actors and little competition.

Here's btw. a screenshot decoded SMS message captured on a SS7 network for your pleasure :-) http://imgur.com/E0qKv

What's in a SMS message? The real cost & just how badly you're being ripped off

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