Techlines Today

Data Charges on Texting are Four Times Higher Than Those of Hubble

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 13, 2008 ⋅

Before mobile carriers made a mint in ringtones they were nickel and dimeing us with SMS texting charges. Without too much effort, overage charges from SMS could double or triple your entire bill. Sending even a megabyte of SMS data would result in almost $1000 in usage fees. This is the mobile phone rip off that few talk about, but scientest Dr Nigel Bannister hopes to change all that by working out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and comparing that with the cost of sending a text.

He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p 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 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB – or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Dr Bannister said it had been difficult to work out exactly how much Hubble data transmission costs. So he contacted NASA who gave him a firm figure of £8.85 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.

The irony of all this? SMS costs the mobile carrier practically nothing! Quite regularly, your phone transmits a 256 byte message to the receiving tower, which transmits a corresponding response. This is how your cell phone connects to the network and determines if you are able to receive calls or not. In actuality, this communication results in 186 bytes of wasted space (out of the 256) – bandwidth that is wasted that could hold other types of data – like SMS! In fact, SMS does ride in this carrier byte packet. Another reason to despise your mobile carrier.