Today I would like to rant about SMS, text messaging, or “flinging shit” as it is sometimes known.

I do not text much, maybe I send a couple a day on average? I can appreciate the system though, unlike Samuel L Jackson. Iit’s eminently convenient, messages arrive more or less straight after they are sent, and it can reach a person wherever they are, so long as their phone’s on (which it always is, these days).

What I do not understand, however, is how mobile operators are still able to charge anywhere upwards of 10p (it were 5p when I were a lad, oh aye) for a meagre 160 characters.

Let’s look at this another way: imagine email could only be 160 characters long, and you couldn’t attach files to it. We’re accustomed to not paying for email as it is, so can you imagine being charged 10p a pop for a service so limited? Even if you got 300 a month for free, it would still leave a bitter taste.

And here’s a newsflash: mobile phones have been able to do email for the last four years. Most can even do “push” email in some form or another (as I have noted before), which means a new message arrives mere moments after it was sent.

Now not everybody wants mobile email, since email is boring, full of spam, and generally to do with work. Not to mention to replace SMS would require basically everybody to be using it – the typical critical mass problem.

But wait! SMS can be packet switched too – chances are yor phone is doing this right now (Jack’s is). So that’s your SMS going over a data connection, just email. A data connection which, even at its stingiest, is going to afford you 5MB a month (this is what my cheap-ass O2 contract allowed me a couple of years ago), which is around twenty thousand 160-character text messages. And yet they are still charged for individually, it’s criminal!

Basically SMS is a massive fucking cash cow for network operators right now (as evidenced by the fact that prices have actually risen from five years ago) which they are using to offest the massive collective fuck-up of paying too damn much for 3G spectrum and infrastructure. That said, I am not keen to be milked for their mistakes, are you?

tl;dr version: where is my flat-rate always-on mobile IP connection over which is routed voice, internet, SMS and terrible pronography?