Text Messaging Continues to Grow; More than 4 Billion Texts Sent a Day
Text Messaging Continues to Grow; More than 4 Billion Texts Sent a Day
Posted 12/23/2009 at 1:58pm
| by Bart Salisbury
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Human beings can’t seem to stay quiet for even short periods of time. It’s chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. Thankfully, we’ve found a new, quieter (though for some no less annoying) way to converse: texting. How popular? Four billion a day and growing.
Figures released by the Cellular Telephone Industries Association (CTIA) say that during the first six months of 2009 some 740 billion text messages were sent. That breaks down to about 4.1 billion per day, or 17 text message each day from data-capable phones. (My thumbs ache just thinking about it.)
CTIA also notes that as the number of text messages rose, the length of voice calls has fallen. Call length peaked at 3.13 minutes in 2007, and since dropped dropped to 2.03 minutes--the lowest average CTIA has recorded.
While we may think ourselves the big winners in all this--texting is something we really, really like to do, but we’d be wrong. Plowing through some simple math on the cost of messaging, CrunchGear figures that a 20-cent, 160 byte message translates to $1,310.72 per megabyte. GDAEman reports that the actual cost to move that much data is $0.15. In other words, the mark-up on text messages is 8,511 percent.
That may seem like a lot to move a mere megabyte of data, but rest assured that cell companies are right now pondering ways to milk even more out of your obsession.
Image Credit: Pink Sherbet/Flickr
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Mighty BOB!
December 28, 2009 at 1:18am
20 cents to send 3 letters (such as lol)(or even 1 letter: k). What a ripoff.
winmaster
December 26, 2009 at 9:53am
My shitty TracFone only costs 2 cents per message (approximately). Also, when you consider small media files that may be attached to a 2 cent text message, I'd say the message is at least 3 or 4 KB, not 160 bytes. Its still a pretty large markup, but some of those figures are just plain unreasonable.
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Tekzel
December 26, 2009 at 7:17am
Uh, I think someone missed a zero or two somewhere. If it costs "$0.15" (15 cents) to send a "20-cent" message that isn't a mark of up of 8,511 percent.
Texting is useful in some scenarios, but I generally find it annoying. Especially when people want to carry on an entire conversation with it. After a couple of exchanges, I usually just tell them "call me if you want to have a conversation". I don't understand kids fascination with it, they sit there for a long time just texting and texting. Crazy.
Shalbatana
December 23, 2009 at 2:21pm
Text messaging is something to be used if one has no access to, or is not in a position to use their phone without interrupting or bothering others.
It is slow, impersonal, and costs too much money. Especially to those of us who do not have a plan with texting included (remember us guys, you cost us money every time you send us that joke that's really not funny). It's simply another way for the phone companies to make more money.
Other than perhaps twitter, and that's assuming people really give a hoot about what you have to say, texting should be considered anti-social and rude.... and yet it's actually accepted as just the opposite. Strange that.
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Who
December 23, 2009 at 3:13pm
well people can use it a lot more discreetly than calls when at work. Imagine every yapping to their buddy about the game last night on a cell phone. Also it's useful if you just want to get a message across without expecting a reply. You can text, "Cya at Denny's at 5" or you can call, wait for them to pick up, go through some informalities, tell ur message, maybe they go on and on about something u don't care about and you have to get back to what you're doing....Saying texting is rude and anti-social is tantamount to calling emails and letters are rude and impersonal because you can't see a person's face and hear inflections in their voice.
Shalbatana
January 09, 2010 at 7:20am
I see your point and agree, it has its uses, however emails ARE impersonal, slightly less than text messaging. Letters tend to be more personal than emails because people tend to take more time crafting them, and really think about what they want to convey, especially when it's hand-written. Just like a phone call is less impersonal than a face to face conversation.
Seems there's a precise inverse correlation between convenience and impersonalism.
(that's the most scholarly sentence I've written in a long, long time.)
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