I'm sorry, but this is just nonsense. A text message is not "a very short phone call". SMS was designed to utilise a part of the GSM system that wasn't able to carry any useful data.
Yes it is, and that oft-repeated explanation, while having some truth, is far too simple.
First off, unlike a data connection that is always initiated from the phone and is shunted to the internet ASAP, a text message must traverse carrier resources and use the network to find a particular phone somewhere in the world.
The text arrives as a call page (aka a ring for voice calls or a pager message). This uses up extra resources already, as a page is sent to multiple towers in the last radio network you connected with.
When the phone receives the page, the message is not there yet. The phone must first authenticate itself to the network and get its own control channel. Then it can receive the control packet with the SMS stuck in it. This is 90% of what a phone call does.
Wait. Not done yet. Then the phone has to acknowledge receiving the text before giving up the channel. If the sender has requested a receipt, this whole process had to now be duplicated in reverse back to the sender.
If the recipient is offline, the text must be stored and tried later. If the recipient is an email address, the text must be translated and sent over the internet, and vice versa. This all requires carrier resources and computing centers that plain internet data does not need.
60 SMS, each sent a second apart would not use the same amount of capacity on the network as a one minute phone call.
Right, they'd use
much more capacity. In fact, too many texts can overload a cell's control signal resources and deny voice service.
Again: Text paths are NOT the same as internet data connections. Not even close.
