AT T says it will only cost you 20 per MB to send a roaming SMS

It shouldn’t be news that SMS charges are one of the biggest scams that is accepted as commonplace. Recently, a writer at Gizmodo wanted to highlight that fact, and ended up getting AT&T to admit that its SMS charges are absurd. This is the kind of story that needs to make the rounds, because we’re pretty sure that there are still people out there who don’t know how much they are getting fleeced by SMS charges.

So, the story goes that Ryan Kearney at Gizmodo saw that AT&T charges $.50 per SMS while roaming (incidentally, all 4 major carriers in the U.S. charge the same rate on roaming SMS messages). Kearney then decided to do a little math, and came up with the number $3.3 million per GB of data sent over SMS while roaming on AT&T. Kearney tweeted this information, and that’s when the insanity started. 

An AT&T employee actually responded to Kearney’s tweet to correct his math, saying, “actually 1 character in a msg equals abt 1 kb.1024KB=1MB..same conversion to GB-AT&T charges 19.97/mb or 120mb for $30 #fact”. That’s right, AT&T flat out says that it will cost you about $20 per MB of SMS data while roaming. Kearney took this information to its logical extreme, then calculating that it would cost $35 million to send an HD movie over SMS while roaming on AT&T (which isn’t even possible). 

Of course, no one is actually going to be sending that amount of data via SMS, roaming or not, but the point still stands that SMS rates are beyond ridiculous. Actually, that gives us an idea for a good article. Stay tuned for “the best apps to avoid SMS and international calling charges”. 

source: Gizmodo

AT T says it will only cost you 20 per MB to send a roaming SMS

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