Shock Report - Hubble Space Telescope not SMS compatible
Dr Nigel Bannister, a scientist at Leicester University, has claimed that sending text messages in the UK is far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope!
This revelation was used in the Channel 4 Dispatches programme “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off”, which ran last week. This exercise in bad science is based on the following ‘logic’ (taken from the Leicester University Press Release):
“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 (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth.
This earth shattering piece of insight has been reported widely, but nobody has thought to question the sense of comparing the two things. Text messages aren’t meant for transmitting data, they are meant for, er, messaging. The clue is in the name. You can’t extract astronomical data from them, just like you can’t get the Hubble Space Telescope to tell your mate you’re running late.
The logic behind comparing data costs for two products that could not have more different uses is like comparing, say, the price of potato by weight in a packet of crisps with the price of bulk potatoes. If a packet of crisps costs 40p per 40grams, that’s 1p per gram. If 2.5kg of potatoes costs £2.50, that’s 0.1p per gram. Oh my god, potato in crisps is tens times more expensive! The great potato snack rip off!! Get Dispatches on the phone now!!!
Back on planet earth, the fact of the matter is that for most people the cost of texting is negligible. It’s not unusual to see text bundles of 100 or more on most contracts. Even pay as you go customers can get discounted texts. Could they be cheaper? Maybe. But as they stand, the cost of texting is not a barrier to general use. Its one of the reasons we encourage many clients at We Love Mobile to make their first steps into mobile advertising or marketing using text. Consumers aren’t scared to text into a shortcode, we have the data to prove this from campaigns, nor are clients phased by the cost of broadcasting texts, which again, is very cheap, especially if you compare it to a mail drop. Add to that a big pinch of creativity and you have a channel that is cheap to use for consumers and advertisers and that works across all handsets and territories. Now you can’t say that about the Hubble Space Telescope.
I also hear the pictures of deep space can be quite blurry……
SimonManaging Director
www.welovemobile.co.uk
Tags: Cost of Texting, Hubble Telescope, Mobile Marketing, SMS Campaign, Text Messages
May 14th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
The great potato snack rip off!! haha
You make a very valid and funny point, comparing the cost of sending a text from your phone to sending data from a telescope to earth is ridiculous!
June 9th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Actually the analogy is misleading as it is actually in reverse. Crisps/chips are processed and so there is a clear economic reason why they are more expensive than raw potatoes.
Text messages, however, are subject to no processing whatsoever by the phone provider. In fact, most of the work is actually done by the user (typing on cell phones is still crap).
Data sent from Hubble is processed at many levels, both on the satellite for compression, and in the labs for decompression, not counting the cost of operating the labs, which themselves make absolutely no money. Cellular networks, on the other hand, are already paid for by user for the basic (talking) service.
By that logic it would be expected that data from Hubble would be much more expensive.
Obviously text messages are compressed as well but for all technical purposes, all that is required by the phone providers is to call 2 program functions (which already exist in all programming languages), at virtually zero cost given the small size of the data.
If talking was priced the same as text, a few minutes would cost hundreds of dollars. Text messages pricing are an horrible rip-off and their price is a strong barrier to adoption.
I live in Canada where prices for data, as well as sms, are outrageous and, surprise, barely anybody uses cell phones for anything else than talking and whatever is resident on the phone (games, music, etc.).
Sorry but the original analysis is very correct in its conclusion.