RoadRunner “Light” vs. AT&T Text Messaging:

At Subway, one can obtain a foot-long Cold-Cut-Combo (Happy’s favorite!) for $5 or a six-inch for $3, $6/foot — a 20% increase. We accept this disparity because it’s more time consuming to prepare two six-inch subs than it is to prepare a single foot-long — perhaps even greater than 20% more time consuming — so nearly everyone can see that’s fair. (But or course, Subway sucks — no one with aspirations of longevity would ever eat there.)

RoadRunner takes this familiar pricing model to the extreme with their “RoadRunner Light” bull-shit: Compared to “normal” RoadRunner (which already sucks), it is 1/10th the bandwidth for 1/2 price. That’s like a 1.2-inch sub that costs $2.50 — $12.50/foot! — a 250% increase. As if this wasn’t bad enough, they dynamically reduce your speed the more you require it. I had the misfortune to experience this while I was downloading a friend’s 327MB system update – the RoadRunner “Light” servers deliberately make large downloads decelerate until you give up.

If Subway’s pricing model was analogous to RoadRunner’s, you would get a one-tenth sub for half price. As you attempted to devour it, you would be forced to take smaller and smaller bites until your realizations of utter futility and impending starvation caused you to abandon your efforts.

But no one, not no one has ridiculous extremes in pricing cornered like AT&T. My AT&T text messaging plan costs $5.00 per month for 200 text messages (2.5¢ per message unless I go over, then it’s 20¢ per message.) The average size of a text message is about 160 bytes. That’s $167,772.16 per megabyte!

My web hosing service charges about $10.00/month and includes 3TB [sic.] of bandwidth. My AT&T text messaging bandwidth is therefor 52,776,557,568 times more expensive per megabyte than my web-host—more than five-trillion-percent more expensive! If wireless bandwidth were actually that expensive, it would cost NASA $8.65*10^10^100 ($8.65 googolplex–to retrieve each digital picture sent home from the Martian rovers. That’s more money than our entire health care system plus the government plus the banks have ever or could ever steal from us. At least that’s comforting :-)