Awesome and completely true cellphone industry rant

The Irksome Cellphone Industry

Why has the price of a text message gone to 20 cents, from 10, in two years? There was no big technology shift. There was no spike in the cost of electrons. 

And speaking of anticompetitive: Isn’t it a little fishy that all four big United States carriers raised their text-message fees at essentially the same time? 

Furthermore, why do text messages get special premium treatment at all? Why are e-mail messages (which require much more data) included with basic Internet service, but text messages require either a per-message fee or a separate package? 

The carriers can’t possibly argue that transmitting text-message data costs them that much money. One blogger (http://bit.ly/gHkES) calculated that the data in a text message costs you about 61 million times as much as the same message sent by e-mail.