the telcos charge more, kilobyte by kilobyte, to send a text message next door, than it costs to send data from Mars – even when including the cost of the actual Mars probe, its launch, and NASA personnel for ten years!
This is an abysmal failure of free market forces to converge the end price with the cost of production.
via falkvinge.net
On a wireline traffic cost of 0.25 cents per GB, the telco industry profit markup comes to 15,000,000,000% (that's 15 Billion percent). Insane.