Texting is the Most Expensive Way to Keep in Touch
by Tran, Harry ~ February 24th, 2009. Filed under: Rants n Raves.Texting Most Expensive Form of Communication
Well let’s see if this post is accurate.
I am paying $5 for 400 text messages in my phone plan. This makes each text that I send or receive come out to be $0.0125 cents a piece.
I pay $40.00 a month for 600 minutes, this plan includes free night minutes that begin after 9PM and weekends are free as well, but let’s not calculate that for a second and consider only those 600 minutes.
Each minute that I use while on voice actually comes out to $0.0666 cents a minute. Add in the extra minutes that I use during nights and weekends and it’ll definitely spread the cost of these minutes around more, similar to economics of scale.
So are text really the most expensive form of communication?
Other forms of communication include email, or instant messaging, but these have different fee structures that are not exactly outlined by your provider as they’re part of an overall package such as a broadband account.
The same goes for the Blackberry Internet Plan that I have, it is difficult to estimate what part of the $20.00 that I have actually goes into the instant messaging part of the data, and what part is used by email.
So while I don’t know if texting is the cheapest form of communication, I don’t believe it is the most expensive form either. Each text that is used after your plan’s bucket of texts are used up may be quite expensive considering how texts are limited by a fixed amount of characters. Whereas you can try to squeeze as many words that could fit into 10 text messages into one quick minute of voice communication.
Do you have a text message plan? Is it something that you use often? Do you text more than you call your contacts?
