Scientist says text messages are 4x more costly than Hubble Telescope's data transmission

Uh, yeah. What? A quick reminder to really drive the point home: Hubble is in space.

A University of Leicester space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the cost of sending a text.

He said: "The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that."

"The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is [about 10 cents]. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 10 cents each, that’s [$734] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs [of $166 per megabyte]."

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