Why texting is too !(VIEWPOINT)(price of text messaging)

JERRY SOBIESKI'S teenagers are forever sending text messages to friends on their cell phones instead of calling them. What baffles and infuriates Sobieski, a computer network engineer from Woodbine, Md., are the rates wireless carriers charge their customers to send and receive text messages.

"Text messages take up almost nothing on their networks, but the carriers are charging much more for them than they do for phone calls, which use up a heck of a lot more space," he says. "The rates for texting are completely outrageous."

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Three years ago, those rates were 10 cents per text at the nation's four big wireless carriers: AT&T, Sprint, TiMobile, and Verizon Wireless. Each company raised rates to 15 cents, then to 20 cents.

Text files are small and cost carriers very little to transmit, so texting is exponentially more expensive to consumers in terms of network space than other cell services. Five hundred text messages contain less data than a 1-minute voice transmission.

Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., also questions text-messaging rates. In letters to the above companies, Kohl, chairman of the Senate's antitrust subcommittee, demanded that wireless carriers explain why they've doubled the cost to customers in near lockstep. Kohl says he's particularly concerned that the rate ...