Uh-oh. The European Commission has committed to cutting termination charges - the fees that mobile operators charge each other for routing each other’s calls - a move that could result in customers having to pay to receive calls to their mobiles.
Currently, mobile operator charge each other about 7p for each call. The EC want to cut this to around a penny, but mobile operators have threatened to pas the cost on to the customer.
Paying to receive calls is the norm in the USA, but this is not likely to be a popular move over here no we are all used to not paying.
Of course, there is nothing to say that the operators have to pass the cost on, but the EC is refusing to intervene.
“I think the business models are not for the European commissioner to decide.” said a spokesman, “Business models are for the operators to decide.”
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?
