Is BBM really FREE ? A quick calculation
Disclaimer: I have absolutely nothing against Blackberrys. In fact, I think it is awesome that more people are getting connected to the web, and using smartphones to do so. It shows how technology is changing, which in my eyes is a VERY good thing :) The below calculation was done out of my own interest, and is not intended to run Blackberry users down ;) The growing trend in South Africa that seems to be that everyone is getting a Blackberry. The reason most people tell me they getting a Blackberry is because they can use BBM and send FREE messages. I suppose at the end of the day, it's a marketing ploy by RIM & the cellular providers, when in fact they are paying for these FREE BBM messages. So I put together a very rough calculation of how many BBM messages you need to send to ensure you spend your R60 monthly BIS fee before BBM really does become free. The calculations below do NOT take email or web browsing, which is all sent through RIM's servers, into account. Vodacom Top-Up/Once off data 110MB bundle is R88. This works out to R0.80 a MB.
Using this rate this means for R60, the monthly Blackberry fee you pay, you get around 75MB of data. If you only use BBM (ie. No email or web).
Each BBM character is 1 byte.
For this example Let's call the average length of a BBM 160 char. SMS length1KB = 1024 Bytes (6,4 messages)
1MB = 1024 KB's = 1,048,576 characters (6553,6 Messages)
75MB = 78,643,200 characters (491 520 messages)Excluding web & email, you will need to send 78,643,200 characters (or 491,520 160 character messages) to make your monthly R60 viable for just BBM !Sounds pretty excessive if you ask me :)
Using this rate this means for R60, the monthly Blackberry fee you pay, you get around 75MB of data. If you only use BBM (ie. No email or web).
Each BBM character is 1 byte.
For this example Let's call the average length of a BBM 160 char. SMS length1KB = 1024 Bytes (6,4 messages)
1MB = 1024 KB's = 1,048,576 characters (6553,6 Messages)
75MB = 78,643,200 characters (491 520 messages)Excluding web & email, you will need to send 78,643,200 characters (or 491,520 160 character messages) to make your monthly R60 viable for just BBM !Sounds pretty excessive if you ask me :)
