How much does it cost to send a picture?

One of the items that we tried to drive home at our meeting with Aliant Mobility a couple of weeks ago was the model we are used to, and the model we are comfortable with, for bandwidth, be it wired or wireless is “we rent the pipe and do with it what we will.”

It’s quite clear that the business model for Aliant Mobility (which is, of course, not alone in the industry here) is pushing is “we rent you the pipe, and then charge you in various ways for using it.”

Witness their new picture messaging service. If you add together the big print and the fine print, here’s what you get:

• 50 cents per picture, plus the applicable Mobile Browser charges based on the photo size.
• Average photo size is 32 KB.
• In addition to the price of the upload, Mobile Browser usage will be charged for the time spent accessing the service and for the uploading process. Mobile Browser usage is billed at $0.05/KB or according to your Mobile Browser bundle.

So I take a picture. They charge me 50 cents for the “service,” and then some non-defined charge for “time spent accessing the service,” and then 5 cents per KB, or $1.60 to “upload” the picture. Total cost, then, is somewhere north of $2.10. Per picture!.

That, to my mind, is insane. Am I missing something here?