While you probably won’t be surprised to learn you are overpaying for your text messages, you may be surprised by just how much you really are.

The New York Times has taken a look in to the Senate antitrust subcommittee’s investigation of text messaging rates, and it is a scary result to be sure.  While the main focus of the investigation has been to determine why text messaging rates have doubled over the past three years, it seems that even $.01 would be too much to pay for a text.

According to a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Srinivasan Keshav, text messaging costs are too minuscule to even be calculated.  This is because he reveals that text messages transmit in an area known as “the control channel” which is essential to the operation of a wireless network, and this also attributes to why text messages are kept to 160 characters so they don’t interfere with the operation of the network itself.  In short, so long as the network is running, text messages are going to pass through a channel that needs to be running any way which means the companies are not paying anything extra to transmit your message.

So when you pay $.20 on a pay-as-you-go plan, the phone companies are making essentially $.20.  Unlimited text plans may look appealing, but they are also pretty much pure profit.

The government is going to continue to look in to this, but I am certainly going to be groaning a little louder each month when I pay my wireless bill.