It’s no secret amongst owners of mobile phones that the price of text messaging is astronomical compared to traditional data costs. The typical SMS weighs in at approximately 160 bytes and costs twenty cents under average US carriers. If this pricing were applied to OTA data, a single megabyte would cost more than $1300. Senator Herb Kohl, Chairman of the Senate Antitrust Committee is equally perplexed by the staggering inequity in the cost of texting.
In what may become a terrific battle between The Man and the often-questionable ethics of the telecom industry, an informal inquiry has been sent by the Senator. In the letter, Kohl makes the implication of collusion in noting that the big four US carriers (VZW, AT&T, T-Mo and Sprint-Nextel) upped their texting rates to twenty cents simultaneously. “Also of concern is that it appears that each of companies has changed the price for text messaging at nearly the same time, with identical price increases,” he said. Kohl writes that such a uniform increase is “hardly consistent with the vigorous price competition we hope to see in a competitive marketplace.”
Senator Kohl hopes that the carriers will explain why the uniform increase in pricing eclipses the relatively stagnant increase in cost to send texts.
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