Did you know that every month you and your family are robbed?

It is true. This is not some column on why you should switch to Geico to save money on your insurance. This is, however, about something that has become so ubiquitous in our lives that we sometimes forget that we pay an obscene amount of money for it. Cellular service providers are charging us thousands of times more than they should for text messaging, but we don’t know anything different.

Let’s look at some of the numbers (I apologize in advance if I lose anyone with any techno-speak). An average text message is roughly 140 bytes (if you are keeping count at home, around 1120 bits).

Now you are probably familiar with the concept of a megabyte (an mp3, which costs 99 cents, is approximately 4 megabytes).

Here is the thing, a kilobyte is 1000 bytes and a megabyte is 1000 kilobytes (lost yet?).

So a megabyte equals one million bytes.

That means that you could fit more than 7000 text messages within a single megabyte.

I know of only a few people who even begin to approach that many text messages in one month.

I use AT&T because I’m slightly addicted to my iPhone. AT&T charges 20 cents per text message sent or received without a text message plan. Twenty cents isn’t that much money at the end of the day, right? Wrong. If we use the numbers from earlier, a megabyte of text messages (7000 texts) is $1,400. A downloaded song is more than four megabytes.

In the grand scheme of things, the amount of data used by text messages is microscopic compared to voice and data usage. New iPhone users can pay $25 dollars a month for 2GB of data (a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes), and you can pay $20 for unlimited texts. If you break that down, you are paying $20 for less than a megabyte of data usage a month.

Every major cellular service provider (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc.) is, in some way, guilty of this. They have charged a substantial amount for these messages in the past and so consumers assume that sending a text message puts enough traffic onto the networks to warrant such a charge.

The simple fact is it does not. The service providers are raking in the money from cell phone users when it comes to texts. I’m sure a lot of you have unlimited text messaging plans either for yourself or your family and so you do not think of the price you pay every month. It is time you started to seriously question that $20 or $30 charge on your account every month.

I can send an email from my phone that is larger than a text message, and it is covered under my unlimited data plan, but if I send a text message it counts towards one of the 1500 text messages I pay $15 a month. That truly makes no sense to me.

We do not have much recourse for this issue since the majority of major carriers employ this deceitful tactic.

Until people start to realize that they are paying hundreds of dollars per year for an amount of data roughly equal to a dozen songs, nothing much is going to change.

If you are switching carriers or upgrading to a new phone in the future, do not be fooled by the different pricing plans available, charging anything more than a few dollars for text messaging is simply taking money out of your pocket for nothing.