AT&T's Text Messages Cost $1,310 per Megabyte

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com. → Learn More

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Today is basic math day at CrunchGear where we discovered that if 160 bytes of SMS data costs twenty cents then 1MB (1,048,576 bytes) of data would cost 131,072 cents, or $1,310.72.

Check out the prices for a text message plan on AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone 3G in the United States. AT&T wants twenty cents ($0.20) per text message if you don’t sign up for a plan. A text message is nothing more than 160 bytes of data. The max is 160 characters, and one character equals one byte of data. Great.

In other words, if AT&T charged data downloads at the rate they charge text messages downloading 1MB of data would cost you $1,310.72.

Read more at CrunchGear

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