Jamo wrote this. If you are more harder coder in Kenya than Jamo, you don’t exist.

I firmly believe network operators the world over actually do reap off their subscribers for a service that ought to cost a tiny fraction of what they charge. Safaricom’s Ongea, Super Taifa and Safari Tariff and Zain’s Pamoja Tariff all charge ksh 3.50 per SMS within their respective
networks. Doing some math here, we can figure out how much this simple transmission is actually costing us.

A standard SMS message contains up to 140 bytes (1120 bits) of data - this takes care of the 160 characters allowed in your text message. This might not make sense at first, until you realize that SMS uses 7 - not 8 - bit characters - leaving you with 128 possible character values
instead of the normal 256 you get in e.g. your computer. So 1120bits/7bits = 160 characters.

So our total SMS length is about a tenth of a kilobyte (.13671875 Kbytes). In terms that the flash disk generation would understand - if you had an flash disk with a tenth of a kilobyte you could fit 1/8000th of a digital copy of Taifa Leo on it (yes, 1/10 of a Kb is that small). I assume here and for the rest of this article that 1 digital copy of Taifa Leo = 8 Megabytes.

If you divide 140 (the total number of bytes available to you) by ksh 3.50 (the cost per SMS), you find that you are paying 1 shilling for every 40 bytes of data. To put this in perspective, it would cost you ksh 204,800/= if you were to send your digital copy of Taifa Leo via SMS!

By comparison, it costs you ksh 8.00/= per 1MB if you use your handset for browsing the internet (btw, this is the most expensive internet option available, so it can only get cheaper). If you were to use your handset’s internet to send an SMS, it would cost you a paltry 1/1000th
of a shilling! Back to our flash disk owner, it would cost him just ksh 64.00 to transfer his entire copy of Taifa Leo to the intended recipient as opposed to ksh 204,800 if he were to use SMS. This option is 3200 times cheaper than the SMS option!

Furthermore, other internet services offerings are cheaper than the one we used in our calculation, meaning the flash disk owner would most likely pay less than ksh 64.00 for transferring his Taifa Leo. Also, the figures we used assume that people actually use all 160 characters available to them. Say people on average actually only used half of the
160 characters (which is still being generous) - then their price of SMS has again doubled!

The marginal cost of an SMS to the network operators is very low to justify the exorbitant fees we have to pay them for every SMS we send. The explanation (in the paragraph below) is somewhat technical, but bottom line is, it is still wickedly expensive for nothing and recent
technological advancements have made it even cheaper for network operators to transmit your SMS messages within and without their own networks. It’s no wonder that network operators make billions in text messaging.

(Initially SMS were implemented in the GSM standard as a control system. The Control channel is the channel that your mobile phone listens to in order to receive calls. So for receiving an SMS a control signal is sent. Since bandwidth is somehow limited on these channels it could happen that in a situation of massive usage of texting the control channel gets saturated and normal voice protocol initiation is disrupted. To prevent this carriers nowadays apply a kind of Quality of
Service (QoS) mechanisms that delay SMSes until there is no risk of congestion. So we can state that the marginal cost is very low and the cost/opportunity is also very low)