AT&T (and everyone else) Charges $1497 per megabyte

In the ramp-up to the new iPhone 3G release, I've been doing some research on plan prices.  Yes, the new plan is $10 more every month.  Duh.  3G is faster and more expensive for AT&T, so it should be more expensive for us.  I get it.

What I don't get is that they have eliminated text messages from the data plan.  You used to get 200, now you get none.  Isn't text just data?  Why is is charged differently?

<<<MATH ALERT>>>

So, taking into account the maximum text message is 160 characters, at 7 bits per character, that makes the maximum text message 140 bytes, or 1.66893005371094e-05 megabytes.  Multiply that times 200, and you get 0.003 megabytes.

AT&T charges  $5 for those 200 text messages, about $0.03 each.  Not bad, right? Wrong.  Those 200 text messages total a maximum of 3/1000 of a megabyte.  And that's assuming you use all 160 characters.  Use less, and it's even more per megabyte, since texts are a flat rate.  If you do the math, buy the 200 text plan, and you're paying almost $1500 PER MEGABYTE of data.  Unfortunately, you don't have a choice, since there's no way to send a text other than the AT&T way (yet...)

By the way, if you send lots of single letter texts, like "K", you're paying $29,959 per megabyte.  Welcome to the future...