Good comment, Chris. The thing that amazes me is the incredible disparity between cellular voice and data fees. As I mentioned in my post, it is all “bits”, but if you figure out what you are paying for voice (500 minutes of 24 thousand bits per second, which is more or less the standard voice data rate) versus data, particularly text messaging, you will see that 1000 to 1 ratio I mentioned. The telcos are charging $0.15 or more for a 120 byte text message: or $30 for 500 minutes of talking ($30 for 72 megabytes). Even $30 for 72 megabytes (or $0.50 a megabyte, more or less) is obscenely over-priced compared to land line costs, but look at the per byte disparity between a text message and voice.

It is, to put it mildly, shocking.