A PS on the great telecoms debate. Vodafone, which gave Scott Wickstein a ‘wicked good deal’ a while back, just *raised* its price for SMS messages by13 percent, mtching Telstra and Optus.

As an aside, SMS must be about the worst value in telecommunications history, in terms of cost per unit of info. As I understand it, the typical message contains less than 25 characters, and costs 25 cents, i.e. 1 cent per byte. A typical ISP will offer a $30/month service with a limit of 300MB. I make the price ratio 100 000 to 1.

Or you could compare voice telephony at, say 20Khz, which is 2.5Kb/sec. At SMS prices, a 1 minute telephone call would cost $1500.

Despite what Scott says, I’m not quite old enough to remember the days of Morse code. But I’d be willing to bet that, at least in nominal terms, even telegrams were cheaper than SMS.