paradoxSpirit writes “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!”"
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