Why is E-Mail free? [closed]

Question

Why is e-mail free and SMS on a mobile phone charged for?

Answer 1

SMS costs so much simply because there's lock in. There are a hundreds of places that will give you an email account, but you can only get SMS from your mobile carrier. The cost and hassle of switching carriers is a large hurdle to overcome, and there are far fewer carriers (who are probably price fixing SMS messages) to choose from if you do decide to switch.

Answer 2

Email technically isn't free, the only difference is that most email is ad-supported. You either pay for email access through an ISP connection fee, or see advertisements (such as gmail or yahoo mail).

SMS costs money because the mobile providers can charge that much. As TheTXI mentioned in the comment, the carriers just charge money because nobody has told them that they can't. Once people revolt, they might eventually change that.

People usually demand that Email it should be provided through ad costs or connection costs while people don't generally demand that for SMS (although they should).

Answer 3

Well you pay for network access in both case, for your internet access in the case of email and for the cellular access in the case of mobile phone.

Answer 4

Most importantly, email providers see the value of an email account holder as greater than the cost. This is typically covered by visible ads, but often goes much deeper to selling (or even just viewing) of related services.

In addition to the answers posted, there's another important difference... government regulation. Because SMS operates over the much more finite resource of radio frequencies, these frequencies are regulated within an inch of their life. The involvement of government regulation in any business will radically increase the price of doing business in that field. Those offering email services are built almost entirely on private infrastructure... and the bandwidth cost is already partially borne by the user through their ISP.

Answer 5

First of all because E-Mail is relatively cheap, per email, whereas phone companies have to maintain not only their software but the network. Mostly though it's because e-mail can be ad-supported whereas SMS messages cannot.

Although don't under estimate the fact that people expect to pay for SMS and not for E-Mail, part of the reason is that users don't expect nor need to pay for e-mail.

Answer 6

SMS is as free as email, at least for me personally. I have unlimited SMS messages (send and receive) included in my base subscription amount. Which is the same for my email, I pay a fixed amount per month to my ISP and I can send and receive as many emails as I want.

Answer 7

because I could set up an e-mail server with a spare PC in hours, buy a domain, and offer free e-mail. I couldn't do that with SMS.

They charge for SMS because they can, and nobody can stop them. With e-mail, it's a completely different story. Low setup, low maintainance.

Answer 8

With SMS you can instantly reach many more people (all those with phones) than you can with email (those sitting in front of an internet connected device). That's why I use them and pay for them.

Many years ago when I first got on the internet, it was charged by the minute. I had a 60 hour a month plan and every time I went only it was deducted from there. If I went over my 60 hours, I got charged extra.

At that time, I had free email from hotmail. But it costed me to connect to the internet to send "free" email.

Years later I could send SMS from my phone and got charged every time a fixed amount for each message.

Now I have a Blackberry with unlimited internet and I can send unlimited emails and get instant responses from anyone connected to the internet (thru other phones or PCs). But still need SMS to reach those that only have a voice plan on their phone.

The future means doom for SMS and the super high profits carriers make with them.

Answer 9

Email is not free. Next time you go to GMail, take a look at the advertisements on the side of the page.

Those advertisers are paying for your use of the service. Or, alternatively, it could be a loss-leader, or a technology test, or other aspects of the corporate strategy.

It used to be - if memory serves - you could buy extra email addresses from your ISP. Today, they can't sustain that model, because email can be had for zero cost to the consumer.

One aspect of email is that it's relatively easy to add an email address that doesn't get much traffic. So I could actually host email on my server, without paying more.

Think of it as a "Stair" kind of cost. For initial outlay, $100/year. That gets you up to maybe 1000 addresses from a hosting company(depending on plan). You can sell those addresses, and unless they provide sufficient traffic to clog your bandwidth, you don't have to pay more than the $100.

Now, why are SMS 10c each? Because cell phone companies like to make money, and it's a highly competetive market where I suspect profit margins are slim.

Answer 10

Same reason this site is free, and same reason Google has that much money.

EDIT

They do sell licenses for some product, but the core income is:

Advertising

On the other hand you can't put that much of ads in sms

Answer 11

Why is email free? Mine isn't. Some services are ad-supported, others may come as part of other packages. There's generally a revenue stream somewhere, if you care to look.

Why does SMS cost so much? Because the phone companies can get away with it. People who set prices do so to their advantage. In the case of SMS, they can charge prices like ten cents for 140 characters, or ten dollars a month for a few hundred messages, and people will pay it.

Most people aren't going to change cell phone providers over the cost of SMS, and many people do use the vastly overpriced service, so there's no incentive for the cell phone companies not to.

Answer 12

The reason for email is free and SMS is not is mostly due to:

1. Barrier of entry; It is very easy and cheap to setup an email service whereas SMS service requires lots of proprietare hardware and software, plus you usually need to be a telco to have approriate licenses and permits.

2. If a service is offered for free, it is very difficult to ask for money later; From the beginning of email, the sending and recieving of messages didn't cost anything, at most you needed to pay for the connection and that is an indirect cost so you don't associate it with the sending of the message. SMS has had a cost ever since it became popular (probably since the beginning, but I can't verify that it has always been so) and telcos will do everything possible to keep it so.

One thing I need to comment on. People always say that SMS doesn't cost anything to the telcos etc. I don't know what the deals are nowadays, but some years back the telcos had to buy a very expensive proprietary SMS gateway server, which was "telco hardware" thus much more expensive than some random x86 server you can buy from Dell. Then they needed to buy a SMS gateway software from some vendor, and there was not that many choices then. The annual license cost for the gateway software had price that was calculated from a base fee + number of servers * number of simultaneous messages sent * messages per second * messages hold in queue (it was probably more complex, and message queue length was cheaper than messages per second etc). Now this meant that the telco had to estimate the worst possible case and buy capacity for that or they might get too many lost messages. This means that most of the time, the system would be using 10% or less of the maximum capacity they pay for.

Nowadays there are more SMS gateway vendors so the infrastructure prices must have come down. But as we are used to paying for SMS, the telcos can keep asking money for this service and profit.