Text Costs More Than Hubble Data

Think texting is cheap? Think again. The University of Leicester’s Dr. Nigel Bannister points out that the cost of SMS is, quite literally, astronomical.
“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 …read more