Will Kemp <Will@xxxx.Swaggie.net> wrote:

> http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html

> A University of Leicester 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.

Its a lot more expensive than the marginal cost of emailing on the net too.

Just more utterly silly shit that only a mindless academic could spew.

> Dr Nigel Bannister's calculations were used for the Channel 4
> Dispatches programme "The Mobile Phone Rip-Off".

> He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble -
> and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.
>
> He said: "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 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p
> each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than
> the 'most pessimistic' estimate for Hubble Space Telescope
> transmission costs."
>
> Dr Bannister 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 (M 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. So that's £8.85 to get each MB from Hubble, to
> the first point of contact on the ground, but no further. Hence we
> need to go a little bit further to estimate exactly how much it costs
> to transmit data from Hubble to the end user - i.e. to the data
> archive which scientists can access. This is difficult, so I had to
> make some conservative assumptions."
>
> Dr Bannister estimated the cost of the data from Hubble could vary
> between £8.85 and £85 per MB- much cheaper than the £374.49 per MB
> cost of transmitting one MB of text.
>
> He concludes: "Hubble is by no means a cheap mission - but the mobile
> phone text costs were pretty astronomical!"
>
> Source: University of Leicester