Mobile economy, Japan vs. Europe

Daniel Scuka at Jan Michael Hess' mobiliser.org: How Europe Really Differs from Japan

Note that in Germany, you're not paying by the packet (SMS is sent via a circuit-switched GSM channel); but my colleague Jan Michael Hess offers an interesting summary. At 0.3 yen per packet, it costs a subscriber in Japan the equivalent of 21.80 Euros to send or receive 1 megabyte of data on 2.5G i-mode in Japan (depending on exchange rates). If SMS were priced per megabyte, based on 19 Euro cents per 160-character message (that's 140 bytes due to 7-bit encoding; so multiply by 7,142 to get approximately 1 MB), consumers would be paying 1,356.98 Euros, or about 62 times what Japanese i-moders pay!