SMS MESSAGING COSTS punters more to use than downloading data directly from the Hubble Space telescope.
Not that many people are likely to download Hubble data, but the figures were used by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme 'The Mobile Phone Rip-Off' to show how phone companies were tucking up their punters.
University of Leicester space scientist Dr Nigel Banister 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 that that texting is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble.
Basically the figures are thus. A text message is 160 characters, which takes up 140 bytes. A million SMS messages can be contained in a megabyte and at 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB.
This is 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs which are about £85 a megabyte, if you take into account the ground stations and the cost of chocolate biscuits for the operators.
