Consumers yearning for the ?good old days? of 10¢ pay-as-you go text messages are unlikely to find such rates with the largest wireless carriers. Charges from T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless are all 15¢ per message sent or received. Recently, Sprint-Nextel announced that their pay-as-you go rate will increase to 20¢ per message sent or received. While we detect a not-so-subtle effort to get consumers to sign up for text-messaging plans, a little math should be done before signing up for one of these plans.

For example, Sprint currently offers a 300-message texting plan for $5.00 per month. For $5 more, users can get an unlimited texting plan. As 20¢ per message, a user would need to send or receive more than 25 messages a month to make the $5.00 plan worthwhile. Beware of signing up for a text-messaging plan where you?re likely to leave a large number of messages unused every month. "If you buy too many, you are wasting money," said John Breyault this week in the Florida Times-Union.

Source: Telecommunications Research and Action Center. http://www.trac.org