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AT&T is adjusting it's messaging pricing plans to be more competitive with Verizon this week. They are changing their $5/200 and $15/1500 messaging plans to one $10/1000 plan for the iPhone. Verizon has not given us any details on its messaging plans for the iPhone, but current subscribers pay $5/250 with $10/500 add-on package.

These new adjustments don't seem to make AT&T that much more competitive If you send a lot of text messages, AT&T always had a better plan. For those who don't send very many messages, AT&T is becoming even less competitive by upping the entry fee from $5 to $10 for the base package. AT&T's new plan would cost 1 penny per message. That may seem cheap until you look at the cost per bandwidth. Text messages are really just bits of data and should be charged by the byte instead of by the message.

Knowing the fact that the maximum size of a text messages are 160 bytes. AT&T's new messaging plan would translate into $10 for 160KB (kilobytes) of data sent at most. Now lets compare this with AT&T's own data plans of $15/200MB for the Data Plus plan and $25/2GB for the Data Pro plan. Of the three plans, the Data Plus has the cheapest cost per megabytes at $.01 per 1MB transferred. The Data Plus is not that far behind at $.08 per 1MB transferred. The new text messaging plan is in a whole different category as the chart below shows.

The cost per 1MB for the text messaging plan is $62.50, which is not even in the same ball park as the other two data plans. The other carriers in the US don't offer any better prices. Cell phone carriers charge a huge premium for text messages compared with their data plans. They are using these messaging plans to nickel and dime the customers. If AT&T wants to be more competitive, they could charge at least $1 for 1000 messages and still come out ahead of the data plans. At just a dollar, the carriers should just make text messages part of the data package.

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