This little press release brought a bit of joy to my day. Senator Herb Kohl sent out an open letter to all the cell phone carriers asking them to explain to him why the cost of SMS messaging has skyrocketed over the past few years. To me, I always thought it made no sense that I can load AOL or Yahoo on a cell phone and chat to my hearts content, but I have to pay $20 bucks a month for unlimited SMS messages.

You have to get unlimited if you do any SMS messaging, not that they tell you. If you gamble on a lower plan and happen to go over, your bill will be sky hi. I remember lowering my plan to the 200 message a month because I had almost stopped sending SMS messages. I happen to go over a few months later and ended up with $200 dollars extra charges on my phone bill. That is ridiculous.

The third paragraph in his letter is the one thing Ive always thought to myself…

What is particularly alarming about this industry-wide rate increase is that it does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages. Text messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit. Text messaging files are a fraction of the size of e-mails or music downloads. Also of concern is that it appears that each of companies has changed the price for text messaging at nearly the same time, with identical price increases. This conduct is hardly consistent with the vigorous price competition we hope to see in a competitive marketplace.

I’m curious to see what type of response this letter gets. Im guessing that since this is an open letter, the carriers cant ignore it.

Read the whole press release which includes the letter here.