Mathematically speaking, it would be stealing.

I have a complete hate for all Cellphone companies, they rip people off 24 / 7. This is simply shown in the math on text messages and how much they cost. Here is the math below, and I will explain it in a second. I try and show some of my work at the end btw.

Simply put, for those of you who don't want to have to muddle through my poorly explained thinking, we pay 2.5 cents a text when we should be paying 1 cent for 77 texts based on the amount of bandwidth required to send them. (this means that the amount of data every second talking is so much, and each text is so much data at the maximum. So when I say bandwidth, I mean data transferred.) This means they are charging you about 192 times per text more than they should. (192.5)

1000 bits = 1 kb (Kilobit)

8 bits = 1 character (a letter e.g: j)

Text messages:

200 characters maximum per text.

5.00$ for 200 text messages a month, 20.00 $ for unlimited per month.

For just 200, that would be 2.5 cents per text.

Talking on the phone:

960 Kilobits / minute (16 kb/s)

5.00 cents / minute

Ok, here is the math part, I am basically plugging in the known information above into my problem. I want to know, how many texts is it going to take to equal me paying the same for texts based on bandwidth used to me talking on the phone.

Talking on the phone, you pay 1 cent for 192 kb.

Texting at the rate of kb/s use for calling you pay 1 cent for about 77 texts

In reality, you pay 5.00 $ for 200 texts which means, you pay 2.5 cents per text. So, you pay 1.92 $ for 77 texts, which, as I previously said, is 1 cent of talk time bandwidth. That is for 77 texts using the maximum number of characters each text.

On an unlimited plan, if you pay 20.00 for unlimited texts, you need to send more than 800 texts to make it worth while to use their plan over the 5.00 plan. If you wanted to text enough to get the same amount of bandwidth required to get 20.00 $ worth of texts running on 192 kb for a cent, you would need to text 153,600 texts within a month just to equal the rate of 5.00 cents / minute of talking time (this would be paying for the 20.00) so get texting!!! you only have about 153,102 texts left, and you will be paying the same rate to talk on the phone as you will to text!

In summary, you must text 4620 texts a minute to be using the same bandwidth as talking on the phone, and you must text 153,600 times to equal 20.00$'s spent on normal minutes just to equal the bandwidth used when chatting on the phone. Which means, you are paying about 192 times more to text over what you pay to talk on the phone. So let them steal from you... what can we do!?! I don't have a solution, but if you have suggestions, feel free to do it. I have always felt this way, and I feel the first step at least in the solution is this: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVL6W3UjbldS3ZNTivfFptpARpOAD933HR680

In this article, he says that texting prices have doubled since in 2005...?!? they are already ripping us off, how much money are they getting from this racket.

Feel free to correct me, or just discuss this below, I tried to show my math below, I didn't show it all, but I tried to show a bit of what I did, all of it was simple math building upon itself.

(960 kb/minute * 400 minutes = 384000 kb in every 400 minutes.) / 2.5 kb per text = 153,600 texts.

(1000/8)*200 = 25000 bits per text message if you use all 200 characters possible.
25000/1000 = 2.5 kb per text.
192/2.5 = 76.8 kbps
.025*77 = 2.925
20.00 / .025 = 800