On the cost of cellphone (SMS) text messages

Here in Spain it costs about 15 eurocents to send a single SMS (cellphone text message). Cross the 160 character limit and you’ll have to pay another 15 cents for each additional block of 160 characters.

Sure, this sucks, and I suspect that the true cost to the network operators for transmitting each message is probably down around 0.1 cents or thereabouts.

But there is a bright side. The cost of sending an SMS message largely explains why I only get around one SMS "spam" per month.

Compare this with electronic mail (referred to as email by some) which is free. I get a few thousand spam in that medium per month; almost all are filtered into a spam box where I don’t have to think about them and several hundred per day are blocked at the server before delivery is even completed. But even though the spam epidemic is largely "under control", there’s no denying that the quantities involved are almost absurdly large.

Now think about what would happen if sending each message cost the spammer 15 cents. A spam run with 5 million victims would suddenly cost a whopping 750,000 euros. The amount of email-borne spam would fall drastically.

But don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating that someone start charging 15 cents for each email we send; I’m merely observing that if I only get one SMS-borne spam per month then the reason for it is economic. And as much as I dislike the network operators’ price-gouging on SMS messages (don’t believe for one second that they’re doing this for our benefit), I can also recognize the bright side of the equation.

And of course, I like email and I hate sending SMS (darn tiny keyboards); that’s one more reason why the inflated price doesn’t bother me too much.