SMS 4x More Expensive Than Data From Hubble

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!""

Comments

Markup

[esocid]

Everyone knows cellular companies markup text services so high it's ridiculous. I think it's in the range of 4000x higher than data transfer rates. You pay 0.10 for 140bytes for texts, or about 0.15 for 1024bytes in any data transfer service.
This just makes it a stellar ripoff. When will it ever change?

Re:Math is HARD

[Lennie]

It doesn't matter, most textmessages are not 160 characters anyway.

Re:Mobile phones are stupidly expensive..

[jsebrech]

these stupid contracts such as "You pay as 15 pounds a month and we'll give you x many text messages free!" What a stupid offer..

It's actually quite clever. By throwing in "freebies", they can take them away at any time. Just like they throw around temporary discounts "sign up for 12 months, and the first 6 months you only pay ..."

The more a company does this, the less likely I am to do business with them. It demonstrates an inherent lack of commitment to the existing customers (who usually don't get the freebies).

Re:and the infrastructure cost doesn't matter?

[EdIII]

because the whole idea that cell towers and the like just sprouted like weeds is appealing but they are costly.

That only sounds insightful. The cell towers in question provide the infrastructure for SMS/VOICE/DATA all at the same time. The cost of the tower is not actually relevant to your argument at all since it applies equally to all the products being provided.

Actually the comparison is bogus because its apple's and oranges. They have nothing in common other than that word "transmit"

Exactly the opposite in fact. Apples/Apples/Apples. Whether or not it is a SMS message, Voice call, or Data connection it is all just digital communications between the cellular handset and the towers. If you were to compare it to the Internet, the cell towers would be your connection and SMS/VOICE/DATA would just be different services communicating on the same foundation of TCP/IP. It's all just packets of data when you get down to it.

How much did it cost to deploy and manage a network capable of servicing text messages?

The best question you have asked so far. I don't know the answer either, but I do KNOW that we can compare that directly with the cost to deploy and manage a network capable of handling digital voice communications.

How much did it cost to deploy the Hubble, let alone a system to manage it?

That question was answered in the article itself by nobody less than NASA themselves. So the data he is using there is accurate.

You are trying to consider the actual costs of a SMS infrastructure. However, you really only need to consider how much more difficult it is to establish a two-way voice communication than send a SMS text message.

In order of difficulty, it starts with a voice conversation being the most difficult, a data session being the 2nd most difficult (I may be wrong here, data could be 1st for all I know), and lastly sending and acknowledging receipt of a SMS message. When you start to think about that ask yourself if a static 160 character SMS message really costs 20-25% of a minute of real time telephone conversation.

That is the real "dirty" truth. Sending a SMS text message only requires a very short transmission of data and a receipt being sent back from the handset. If you were to attempt to compare that "Apple" to the "Orange" that is a 60 second slice of a voice call, you would find that a 60 second voice call is really just about a thousand of those little SMS messages being sent back and forth between the tower and handset. I came up with that number by assuming that a voice call will require at least 2.5KB/s of data for a decent quality connection. Take 2500 bytes and divide that by 140 bytes (from the article) and you get approx. 18 SMS messages per second of voice, which is 1080 SMS messages per minute.

A SMS message is at most 1/1000th of the difficulty of sending and receiving voice data. There is no "separate" cell tower infrastructure that is more complex, and thus more costly, than the voice/data infrastructure. SMS was a tiny little added feature that turned into something else along the way, namely a astronomically high margin product.

I am not even really that mad at them. They found a price point that people were willing to pay for a product that cost them far far less to "produce". I just happened to be one of the people that knew how high their margin really was and decided to not pay them for it. Caveat Emptor.

Re:is this a dupe--or just inisghtful

[Kjella]

Lack of competition and cost awareness. Really.

For example, take the data rates while abroad. Do you really think the extra cost of transferring data across the world (you know, like you're doing right now) justified a price that's often tens of dollars per megabyte? Or that in-flight calls really cost that much? They charge what people will pay, simple as that.