The New York Times recently wrote a story on the dirty little secret behind cell phone companies and text messages – something they would be very happy that if you the consumer never found out – it costs them basically nothing, but you bundles.
Text messaging is sent through the call-setup/teardown control channel, which also explains why the character set is quite limited. This control channel is a lower level channel used by the mobile phone device to setup and tear down the call with the local cell phone tower. This channel has to be there, and is not used at all 99.9% of the time. Of course, the cell phone companies decided to use this free bandwidth to send text messaging over and charge you a whopping 10 cents a message or $19.99 a month for unlimited use of this “free” channel/bandwidth.
You can read more about how you are getting ripped-off here.
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