Article by Daniel Björkegren: “The cost of using artificial intelligence (AI) has plummeted. Almost every smartphone in the world can access AI chatbots for free for several queries a day, through ChatGPT, WhatsApp, Google, or other providers. However, these services have yet to reach most mobile phones that lack active internet service, which number around 1.7 billion based on statistics from the International Telecommunication Union, or ITU. Those phones are in the hands of on the order of a billion people who are excluded from AI. They include some of the world’s poorest and most remote residents, who might use the technology to obtain information of all sorts, including advice on business, education, health, and agriculture.
Basic mobile phones could theoretically access AI services through text messages, through a technology developed in the 1990s called short message service or SMS. SMS allows the sending and receiving of messages of up to 160 characters of text. It is extremely efficient: SMS uses the leftover capacity of a cellular network, so the marginal resource use per message is tiny. And it is popular: over 6 trillion SMS messages were sent in the latest year in which data is available.
However, in many countries mobile phone operators charge application providers extremely high prices for SMS, which limit the viability of digital services for basic phones. SMS pricing in different countries can be opaque, so I gathered prices from several reputable international platforms and, when available, from major operators themselves. The prices I could find vary dramatically: for example, it would cost $0.08 to send 100 SMS messages to users in Ghana (through an operator)—but $44.75 to send the same messages to users in Pakistan (through the platform Vonage Nexmo; a major operator did not provide prices in response to my request). Overall, prices are high: for the median phone without internet, the priceI found is $5.33 per 100 messages sent. These prices represent the lowest bulk or application-to-person (A2P) SMS rate that would be paid by an organization sending messages from a digital service (the end of the post describes the methodology). Consumers are typically also charged separate retail prices for any messages they send, though message allowances may be included in their plans. While it may be possible for organizations to negotiate lower prices, A2P SMS is expensive any way you look at it. The median A2P SMS price corresponds to $380,616 per gigabyte of data transmitted. In comparison, when using mobile data on a smartphone the median price of bandwidth is only $6 per gigabyte. For the median price of sending one message via SMS, you could send 58,775 similarly sized messages via mobile data on a smartphone. SMS is expensive relative to mobile internet around the world, as shown in Table 1, which shows statistics by country…(More)”.
