How Much Does Texting Really Cost?

Dave Bateman — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:16:00 +0000

I am not sure, but I sometimes think people have forgotten how to use a telephone to actually make a call. As cell phones have evolved, more and more features have been added to them making them a much more useful device. I have no problem with that. As a matter of fact, I am sure I use my phone to surf the web far more than I do to talk to someone. However, for the most part, when I need to talk to someone, I actually dial their number and talk to them, not send them a text. Don’t get me wrong, I do text, but not in place of talking to someone. Far too often I have seen people text each other back and forth for a half an hour to communicate something that could have been done in less than five minutes by actually talking.

This got me thinking, how much does it really cost to text when you account for all of the factors, such as time, loss of productivity, miscommunication, etc? Since there are so many factors, it is hard to calculate, but I am sure that if anyone ever did a study on this the real cost of texting would be alarming. While I was researching this topic, I did find one very interesting fact. When you take a hard look at what carriers charge to send a text, it is staggering, some many even call it criminal. People that don’t have some type of texting plan are normally charged 20 cents per text. While that doesn’t seem that expensive, it is without a doubt the most expensive way to transmit data. Look at it this way, a text is normally 160 characters or less. This means it contains 160 bytes of data. A gigbyte of data is 1,073,741,824 bytes. When you do the math, you see that you can send around 6710886 text per gigabyte. When you multiply 6710866 by 20 (the cost of a single text) you find that a staggering $1,342,173.20 is charged for a single gigabyte worth of texting. I think I’ll just save about $1,342,173 and make a call next time.

Too Many Acronyms – Website of the Week

Dave Bateman — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:47:27 +0000

There are simply too may TLAs nowadays. What’s a TLA you ask? Three Letter Acronym, of course! Get it? It’s kind of funny because TLA is a three letter acronym. OK, never mind the nerd humor. The point is that in the tech world acronyms are tossed around like confetti on New Years Eve. Sometimes just for fun I will count the number of acronyms I hear during a meeting. People seem to think if they know what an acronym means then everyone else does. And now with texting and Instant Messaging (IM) it has only gotten worse. It seems like the text lingo is slipping into everyday conversations. Next time you are talking to your friend, you know the one that texts so much their cell provider has asked them to switch companies, listen closely and odds are you will hear one or two “BTW” or “JK.”

So how is anyone expected to keep all of these acronyms straight? Well, I cheat. I use a website called Acronymfinder. It maintains a searchable database of millions of acronyms. Since an acronym can often have many different definitions, (check out TLA and you will see what I mean) this web site ranks and categorizes them, which makes finding the correct definition a lot easier.

For text/IM lingo, I use a site called Netlingo. It contains a searchable database of pretty much any acronym you will run across in a text or IM. It’s actually kind of fun to make up an acronym and see if it comes back with anything. Just today I found out that PAL stands for Parents Are Listening.

With all of these terms and jargon filling up our days, I sure could go for an AFZ – that stands for Acronym Free Zone, if you didn’t know. TTYL!

Can you hear me now? Tales from a Cisco voice instructor » texting

How Much Does Texting Really Cost?

Too Many Acronyms – Website of the Week