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There is a lot of talk in Australia about broadband at the moment as our Government tries to decide which telco or group of telco's to help out with a heap of our cash in an attempt at building a cheap national network. This got me to thinking about the cost of the broadband that we have now.
At home I am on a Telstra Bigpond ADSL2+ Liberty plan. It gives me 12G (12 Gigabytes) of download for $89.95 per month (I have a full service Telstra fixed phone so I receive a discount).
Brad's mobile is on a plan and is charged 25 cents to send an SMS text message.
Emma is on pre paid and is charged 1 cent to send an SMS text message to another Telstra mobile.
You might be wondering why I've bothered to mention SMS text messaging? Well a txt message is just another way of sending data over the same sort of networks as our Internet data travels. I won't bore you with a lot of the math, however we can send up to 160 characters in a SMS text message. That's 140 bytes of data per SMS. Can you see where I'm heading?
For my monthly allowance of 12 Gigabytes on my Bigpond broadband service I could send 92035013 txt's. That works out to only 0.0000098 cents per txt. A bargain!!!!!
If I were to send the same amount of txt's on Emma's 1 cent prepaid deal it would cost $920350.
If I were to send the same amount of txt's on Brad's 25 cent plan it would cost a massive $23008753. Yup, thats over 23 Million dollars per month !!!!
Now, do you still think ADSL broadband is expensive?
If you are really bored, then click the read more link below to see some of the math.......
SMS 160 characters, 1 character is 7 bits. 160*7=1120bits 8 bits per bytes so 1120/8=140bytes per sms
Yes, the international SMS protocol uses 7 bits per character, not 8!
1 Megabyte is 1048576 bytes (1024 * 1024)
1048576/140=7490 text messages per MB
1c txt 7490*0.01 = $75 per MB
25c txt 7490*0.25 = $1872 per MB
12GB ADSL2+ liberty $89.95 = 12884901888 bytes =0.000000070 cents per byte = 0.0000098 cents per txt
12GB by txt is 12884901888/140=92035013 txts = $920350 on 1c txt or $23008753 on 25c plan
I guess it's a bit unfair to compare a fixed line service like ADSL to a mobile service like Telstra NextG given all of the added expenses and limitations that come with a mobile network, so I also did some math for the NextG mobile data plans;
PAYG rate $2/MB = $2 per 7490 txt's = 2.7c per txt
$89 plan pack 1 Gb 7490*1024 = 7669760 txt's = 0.12c per txt
http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/plans/browsing_packs.html
http://www.telstra.com.au/telstraprepaidplus/latestoffers/plus_packs/browse.htm
http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/services/text_messaging.html
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