Unfair Practices (a rant worth $0.30)

I received two text messages from Telus today:

• The first one said that, starting in August, I would be paying $0.15 just for the honour of reading useless messages (like this one).
  
• The second message was to remind me that if I subscribe to their text message plan (something I don't need because I write 3 text messages a month) I won't need to pay the $0.30 that Telus had now cost me in useless incoming text messages to anounce their intent to gouge me.

Are they even aware of how ironic (not to mention evil) this is?!? If I were the evil one I would get the unlimited texting plan and start randomly spamming people with a message saying "I just cost you $0.15". Do you think that would get people mad enough to actually do something about this?

The worst part is that even their $0.15 outgoing charge is completely and absolutely unjustified in every sense immaginable. It will cost Telus less than nothing in bandwidth to handle a text message and since they're already charging the person who's sending it anyway.... I grind my teeth.... grrrrr

Don't believe me? Let me prove it to you.

• The average phone has voice quality roughly equal to 8 kilobits per second (To showcase how terrible this is, MP3 quality averages in at 192 kilobits/ s )
• Each character of text or a space costs 7 bits (1000 bits = 1 kilobit)

This means that when you call someone for a little over 2 minutes that's the equivalent of tapping out the full text of Alice in Wonderland (Original edition text including spaces) in nearly 550 text messages and sending it over. The 2 minute phone call would cost you $0.70 if you're paying flat out without a minute plan (which is unreasonable to begin with and higher than anywhere else in the world). The text messages would cost you $81.40. I sense a math disturbance in the force.