According to a scientist from Leicester, text messaging costs 4 times as much as receiving data from Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope. This does seem quite ludicrous so let me break it down for you.
The average text costs 5p, which seems like nothing compared to the £85 it costs to obtain a megabyte of data from the Hubble which is 595km (370 miles) from earth. However, the maximum size for a text message is 160 characters. This takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so now for a bit of maths - 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit just one megabyte. At 5p per text, this works out to £374.49 per MB
So all that time you spend tapping away on your phone is actually costing you a few fair bucks for just one meg of info. Interesting, no?
[via The Metro]
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