Text Message: the New Barrel of Crude Oil.

Texts are no longer the quick, efficient way to contact friends. Since 2005, all major carriers have DOUBLED text rates from 10 to 20 cents. [eek! I didn't even notice!] The jump of gas from $2.27 to $4.06 is actually about on par as far as skyrocketing increases.

The question is: what's behind this? In my dad's words: they rape you on these text plans. SMS messages are super simple to send. Cheap for the companies. And there has been no rise in the cost to carriers, only to users. The mark up is thousands of times what they pay for the message transfer.

One blogger has done the math. If the same pricing was applied on a per-byte basis to downloading one 4MB song it would cost the user almost $6,000 to download a single song via SMS texting.

And the answer is: they do it b/c they can. And I'm still gonna text like hell. Because when you just have one thing to say, why bother with the useless and oftentimes fruitless banter?