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.
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."
"There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's one million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5 pence each, that's £374.49 per MB or about 4.4 times more expensive than the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope (HST) transmission costs."
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 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.
"This doesn't include the cost of the ground stations and the time of the personnel along the way, but it is an unambiguous number for that part of the process."
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