Jenna Wortham, writing for the NYT:

It costs the carriers about a third of a penny to send text messages. Considering that the major carriers charge 10 to 20 cents to send and receive them, “it’s something like a 4,090 percent markup,”

At 20 cents and 160 characters per message, wireless customers are paying roughly $1,500 to send a megabyte of text traffic over the cell network. By comparison, the cost to send that same amount of data using a $25-a-month, two-gigabyte data plan works out to 1.25 cents.

Despicable.

Of all the ways cell phone carriers in the U.S. had been screwing their customers for years (locked phones, crippling features, contracts, termination fees, poor customer service, call quality, drop calls, data theft) - this got to be is the most vile and outrageous. Something that wasn’t mentioned in the piece that many may not be aware of: if you happen to send or receive a text from overseas (which by the way aren’t covered in any of their already expensive text plans) - they’ll charge you 25 cents each way. Yep. 25 cents. Both times. And there’s nothing you can do about it. There is some hope in the upcoming iOS5 free iMessage feature. But that’s only for iOS devices AND the cell phone carriers are already plotting:

AT&T recently started requiring new subscribers to choose between two texting plans: pay $20 a month to send unlimited text messages or pay 20 cents for each message sent and received. The company will no longer offer a plan that charged users $10 a month for 1,000 text messages. This is apparently aimed at pushing customers toward a pricier plan even if they are not heavy texters.

I can’t think of any other industry that is as slimy, monopolistic and unholy as the wireless carriers in the U.S. They are the worst. Period.