Is there any reason, beyond corporate greed, for SMS messages to cost so much?

If I get it right, an SMS message is just a short string of data, no different from a message we send in a messenger. If so, then what makes them so expensive? If we’d take Internet plans and consider how much data an SMS takes, we should pay tiny fraction of a cent for each message; why doesn’t that happen?

    • 👍Maximum Derek👍
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      8 months ago

      In the wild west days of the internet we used to connect consumer CDMA phones straight to our servers. You’d walk around your COLO and peek in racks of crazy expensive, rack mounted hardware with the world’s cheapest flip phone sitting on top.

      The telcos caught wind and started terminating accounts. It was a great way to have a server tell you it fell off the network.