SMS more expensive than transmitting data from space

I’m sure many of you have received a mobile bill and thought “Blimey, my SMS charges are astronomical!”

Little did you realise just how right you were..

A scientist at the University of Leicester has calculated that the cost of sending a text message is four times more expensive that that of transmitting the same data from the Hubble Space telescope.

As part of research conducted for Channel 4′s Dispatches programme “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off”, Dr Nigel Bannister contacted NASA who told him that it costs approximately £8.85 per megabyte (MB) to transmit data from Hubble to a receiving ground station on Earth. From there, there are further transmissions required to get the data to the right people in observatories and universities, etc. which can push the cost up to nearly £85 per MB.

A single SMS text message has a maximum size of 140 bytes (160 characters encoded at 7 bits per character) . There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte so it will take 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte.

Assuming an average cost of 5p per text, that works out at a whopping £374.49 per MB – about 4.4 times more expensive than sending the same data from space.

Which rather begs the question – how much would it cost to text your mate on the International Space Station?

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