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SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble [SlashDot]

“Physorg has a paper comparing the cost of text messaging versus the cost of getting data from Hubble Space Telescope.

From the article: ‘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 [$732.95] per MB — or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.” “Hubble is by no means a cheap mission — but the mobile phone text costs were pretty astronomical!"”

Is that surprising?

As heard from a friend working at a mobile phone company shortly after text messages (or SMSs) were introduced: text messages are using the existing signaling infrastructure and had virtually no additional network costs when introduced.

Mobile phone company could have added SMSs at not cost at all but had to set some “symbolic” price to avoid getting overloaded by the tsunami of free text messages. This “symbolic” price is what we are paying now.

P.S. Personally, I do not worry about the cost of SMS messages that much, but would rather encourage mobile phone operators to provide 3G data services at affordable, low price.