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on Twitter Does your cell phone bill ever reach astronomical
proportions? Maybe you’re doing too much texting. One space
scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones
works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from
the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Nigel Bannister from the
University of Leicester looked at the cost of obtaining a
megabyte of data from Hubble and compared it with the cost of
sending a text. His calculations? â€œThe 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.”
Bannister says, â€œThe 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 5 pence (about .10 USD).
There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140
= 7490 text messages to transmit one