Some Nigerians are clamouring for more reduction on the
charges associated with the Short Messaging Service (SMS) in the country,
reports ITRealms.
Investigations conducted by ITRealms revealed that on average,
Nigerian telephone networks charge about N1,000 for 1 Giga Byte (GB) of data.
Confirming this variation in SMS charges, an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Engineer, Rev. Sunday Folayan said that this simplifies to the fact that 10 Kilobytes goes for 1 Kobo.
“That is an estimated 10,000 characters cost a mere 1 Kobo,”
he declared, stressing that when it’s contrasted with an SMS of 160 characters,
it would cost a whooping N4.
He lamented that even banks in the country are charging
customers some N10 per alert message, something that should be a free service.
Folayan also postulated that this means that 10,000
characters will cost N250, which he further contrasted this with the 1 Kobo
that a 10kbytes currently costs.
The Rev. Engineer argued that this does not seem equitable at
all, because the networks could ship with data-based messaging applications
like WhatsApp with attendance implication of free calls, which will deny
operators a lot of revenues.
“… But if they do, we will begin to use it for voice calls
too, eating totally into their dubious pie,” he said.
He, therefore alleged there is conspiracy of exploitation in
that area, which requires the regulator to quickly move in to protect the common
service users in the country, particularly the SMS.
Alexander Akayet
Akaahs Cost of running diesel generators 24 hrs at every base station they
will say; while staying up all night counting their heaps of profit.
For Ade
Atobatele, NCC figured this out a while back and that was the basis
of SMS dropping from 10 Naira to 4 Naira, but concurred that the cost of SMS
could still drop.
“It could easily drop quite a bit more,” he said.
“It could easily drop quite a bit more,” he said.
Esther
Esekheilu Anor decried the rate of exploiting Nigerians by the operators, saying
it’s getting out of hand, while inviting God to help SMS users in this part of
the world.
Also commenting, Mojeed
Kolawole Adegoke said it may be surprisingly that those at the National Assembly
(NASS) know about this, but wouldn't act positively, alleging, “they could have
been bribed to shut their eyes against the cheat.”
Adegoke equally invited God to save the Nigerian nation.
Experts at Wikipedia, an open source encyclopedia defined
Gigabyte as a term commonly used to mean either 10003 bytes or 10243 bytes.
The latter binary usage, experts also said, originated as
compromised technical jargon for byte multiples that needed to be expressed in
a power of 2, but lacked a convenient name.
+Remmy Nweke (ITRealms) +ITRealms DSA
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