It certainly seems like a little bit of consumer education should go a long way, but without competition – or in the presence of collusion – we'll end up with something looking more like text messaging.
Everybody knows the cost to the carrier is only a fraction of what they charge, but there's no competitor willing to charge less. Education, unfortunately, seems to only go so far.
Let me clarify. At 6$ a month, I don't feel like I'm getting ripped off, even if it really doesn't cost them nearly that much to provide me the service. The t-shirt I'm wearing costs maybe $1 in raw materials and manufacturing, but it sold for $20. I got it 50% off for 10$. Am I getting ripped off? Should $10 for a t-shirt not seem like a fair price?
Indeed. People today expect to get paid for their creativity and the value they provide to customers or businesses, but they still expect to pay based on raw material cost. You can't have it both ways. It's silly to think you should get paid based on value but pay others based on cost.
Part of my other point was that the comparisons in the link to why SMS is ridiculously overpriced, in which the cost of downloading songs via SMS is calculated to be in the millions of dollars, is that that's a bogus argument. If you're sending that many SMS's, get an unlimited plan. If your carrier doesn't have an unlimited plan, switch to one that does. Consumer education is fine, but there's also something to be said about consumer responsibility.
That article is comparing apples to oranges. I perfectly agree that SMS prices are a ripoff, but to evaluate this the author should be looking at what it costs AT&T to send a text message - not at what Comcast charges you for wired broadband! After all, I bet that SMS is a wonderful deal compared to what it costs NASA to send .13 Kb to the ISS ...
That's some pretty bad math. That analysis uses the average characters/message for SMS, but uses the maximum characters/letter for postal delivery. The average is probably less than a page.
It also double-counts SMS costs (for sending and for receiving), but doesn't double-count the ISP bandwidth costs.
Still, I agree with its conclusion: there's no good reason for texts to cost so much.
Everybody knows the cost to the carrier is only a fraction of what they charge, but there's no competitor willing to charge less. Education, unfortunately, seems to only go so far.