A study by Dr Nigel Bannister of University of Leicester (United Kingdom) reveals that sending a text message is at least four times more expensive than receiving scientific data from space.
He worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Channel 4’s programme Dispatches also showed this in “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off”.
According to the calculations he compared the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble and the average 5p cost of sending a text.
Dr Bannister said:
The bottom line is that texting is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.
His calculation is as follows:
The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only seven bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p.
There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s one million/140 = 7,490 text messages to transmit one megabyte.
At 5p each that’s £374.49 per megabyte, or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs which according to NASA costs costs £8.85 per megabyte.
So that’s £8.85 to get each megabyte from Hubble to the first point of contact on the ground, but no further.
Then he went a little bit further to estimate exactly how much it costs to transmit data from Hubble to the end user, i.e. to the data archive which scientists can access. Because this is difficult to calculate accurately, so he made some conservative assumptions.
Dr Bannister estimated that the cost of the data from Hubble could vary between £8.85 and £85 per megabyte, which is much cheaper than the £374.49 per megabyte cost of transmitting one megabyte of text.
Hubble is by no means a cheap mission, but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical, he said.
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