Why is text messaging so expensive? (relatively speaking of course)?

Question

I'm a software engineer so feel free to dig deep into the details on why sending a few 100 bytes of data on my cell phone every month is so expensive relative to voice data. Isn't it all digital data? Doesn't all this digital data traverse in the same network.

Please fill me in on the technical details.

Answer 1

This is not as much a technical issue as a marketing issue.

If you're talking US, it's true that txting is more expensive than talking, but that's also encouraged by the ethic that talk is cheap, and that the great majority of cell phone use continues to be voice.

On the other hand, take the Philippines, as an example, where txting is less expensive than talking, so the majority of cell phone use there is txting.

I'm a telecomm engineer, so I'm well aware of the fact that what seems obvious to us techies doesn't always translate to the ordinary person. And this is one of them.