SMS and the Evils of the Cell Phone Industry
SMS and Text Messaging is quite possibly the largest mass act of theft ever perpetrated in the history of US commerce. So much so that it makes Bernie Madoff look like a shop lifter by comparison. To understand just why this is an act of theft by Wireless Companies, one needs to understand a few simple things about how SMS works.
Digital Mobile phones communicate with the cell towers in various ways and frequencies that all boil down to some method of Code Division. Code Division cuts up digital radio traffic into small chunks (sometimes called “frames”) that allow many devices to share the same frequency space. This is why each cell phone does not have its own “channel” like analog TVs, CB, or police radios do. There is a lot of “non-voice” traffic that get exchanged between a mobile handset and the tower(s) it is hooked to. Most of these “non-voice” digital communications involve the handset telling the tower it signal strength, location data relative to other towers, call status, etc, etc, or the tower telling the handset things like the exact time. Your phone exchanges many of these “non-voice” digital messages per minute, each of which is transmitted or received in a Code Division chunk/frame. Even when there is no “non-voice” data per-say, your phone may still be transmitting empty frames just as part of the protocol.
Soon after the first deployment of a digital cell phone system in 1982 it was realized that after you packed in all the mundane “non-voice” signaling data there was still empty space left in the frame. The ideal was proposed to allow “extra” data to be packaged in this empty frame space, the phone was sending up the data anyway, why not use all the available bits? The “extra” data could be composed by the user of the mobile phone as sort text messages, or as text alerts from the network, and thus SMS was born. Later, in 1985, a full specification of using partial and spare frames was created. The ubiquitous 160 character limit comes from the space limitation of a single Code Division Frame, including the overhead of routing data (to and from numbers). The first SMS message as we know them today was sent in the UK on December 3 1992 by Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis on the Vodafone network, it read “Merry Christmas”.
Now 17 years on, SMS and text messaging is a multi billion dollar a year industry with some messages costing as much as $1 for 160 charters of data. In fact, text messaging charges are bankrupting families who fall into the trap of “over texting”. The internet is filled with stories of families that get $1,000 invoices from Cell phone companies who then seem to think there is nothing morally wrong with that amount and expect the subscriber to make prompt payment. The cost to a subscriber of sending text messages is at least FOUR TIMES the cost NASA pays to get images off the Hubble Space Telescope. To put this into perspective, to transmit the King James Bible (without annotations) over AT&Ts text messaging network would cost $12,400.00. If you converted a single music file to text and sent it over AT&T is would cost about $6,000.00.
It’s outrageous and here’s the truly sad (and I think criminal) part, IT’S ALL FAKE. The text message system is simply part of the Digital Cell Phone Protocol. Those tiny text messages are being squeezed into otherwise blank areas of Code Division Frames. Transmitting those frames, blank or not, are essential for the cell network to function. It costs the cell phone companies the same to send your text message as it does to simply leave your phone turned on. Yet these companies are making ungodly amounts of money on nothing more than perceived value and empty space. IN FACT is costs the Cell Phone Companies MORE if you ask them to turn off Text messaging on your phone. If you ask them to turn it off, the signally protocol still requires that you transmit and receive text message frames, but the cell phone company has to proactively block those messages at many points on the network. What a completely upside down scenario, over charging people for nothing vs. spending money and effort to implement something for which cannot be invoiced.
