SMS costlier than Hubble transmission

Calculations made by the University of Leicester’s expert Nigel Bannister, who worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble and compared that with the five pence cost of sending a text, were used for the Channel 4 Dispatches programme “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off”.

Bannister said: “The bottom line is texting is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.”

He explained that 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 5 pence.

He 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 pounds per megabyte

“So that’s 8.85 pounds to get each MB from Hubble, to the first point of contact on the ground, but no further. Hence we need to go 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. This is difficult, so I had to make some conservative assumptions.”

Bannister estimated the cost of the data from Hubble could vary between 8.85 pounds and 85 pounds per MB — much cheaper than the 374.49 pounds per MB cost of transmitting one MB of text.

He concluded: “Hubble is by no means a cheap mission but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!”