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

Interesting way to look at it

[faloi]

I've often believed (known?) that text messaging is just a last refuge of the cell phone companies to squeeze a little extra money out of their consumers. As it is, on my carrier, I get unlimited calling to people on the same carrier all day, every day. I get unlimited calling to anybody, regardless of carrier, on nights and weekends. I even pay to have unlimited data transfer. But if I send more than number of text messages a month, it adds up substantially.

Good thing they've got all those teenagers hooked on it.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[Hatta]

Right. This is no different than paying $4 for a hot dog at a ball park when you could get the same hot dog at home for $0.25. Yeah it's a ripoff, but you're a captive audience. If you don't like it, wait until you get home.

Re:Interesting way to look at it

[InsaneProcessor]

Sprint, for one, offers unlimited text, voice, data, etc. for less than $100 a month - so I don't see the "squeeze" you are referring to.

You, my friend, have no concept of your expenses and how much you waste. I pay $100 for 4 phones with voice mail and all of the fancy features. I get 1000 minutes a month anywhere in the US and unlimited to any T-mobile phones. They want to charge me $0.15 per message that I receive. I have no control over anyone sening me messages so I, as a customer, am screwed. I don't even want this service and am forced to pay for it anyway. They will not turn it off.

This is highway robbery and is wrong! How do we stop this?

Mobile phones are stupidly expensive..

[LingNoi]

and they have 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.. I mean what's next. I pay Microsoft 250 pounds and they give me a free operating system? Who are the kidding here?

When in Thailand I had the best phone contract ever with DTAC, 8 pounds a month, free phone calls any time for as long as I wanted to 5 selected numbers including 500 hours internet usage.

To ask for such a price in the places such as England would get you laughed out the shop.

The opposite is true in Japan

[Guanine]

From what I've heard, the opposite is true in Japan: their voice plans are expensive compared to ours, whereas unlimited text messages are the norm. This makes more sense because voice is clearly the more bandwidth hungry form of communication.

I'm told that the driving factor behind this unlimited texting is that it is considered very rude to talk on your phone in public/the subway/etc. Hence texting as the dominant type of communication. Can anyone confirm/correct me on this?

Re:Math is HARD

[Art Popp]

First off, they're kinda right for the wrong reasons.

The "delivered" portion of the short message service (SMS) message is 140 characters and they do combine the unused 8th bits to yield 160 7 bit ascii characters per message. I don't know how much of the hubble's overhead was included in the article's 8.85 GBP per megabyte.

While greed is always a factor with big corporations, many of the charges put in place have primary purpose of keeping capacity in check. While the marketing folk at big telecomm corporations love the word "unlimited" it creates nightmares for the engineering folk who find that their SS7 network completely congested. They investitage and find that while it was designed to carry 30 SMSs per day for the 30 million subscribers for which it was scaled is now at it's limit because of an open source project that breaks up TCP packets and transmits them over SMS and allows people to download pr0n to their restrictive countries over SMS.

My favorite carrier offers unlimited texting for $20 per month. The way his daughters send messages he's getting them at 1/4 cent apiece.

So, slightly cheaper than from the Hubble! Score!

Re:Double dipping

[psmears]

And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent. Only in the US. In the UK (and the rest of Europe, AFAIK) the telcos don't charge you for receiving texts—and even the idea of them doing so is considered absurd.

Re:Double dipping

[_xeno_]

I don't really care about being charged minutes to receive calls - it seems fair enough, I'm using air time. I can check the caller ID and refuse the call if I don't want to be charged. It hasn't been a big deal.

Getting dinged $0.20 per spam SMS? That's a bit more annoying. There's no way to refuse a text message (on Sprint, at least). And thanks to the email-to-SMS gateway, the spammer doesn't get charged a penny. (I'm noticing that a huge percentage of spam I receive on my regular account is, for some strange reason, under 160 characters.)

It's even more annoying because I have an unlimited data plan - I can send and receive unlimited email from my Gmail account. I can view satellite imagery on Google Maps, which I'm fairly sure involves more data transfer than an SMS. But receive one text message? Boom, $0.20 charge.

Re:Double dipping

[TheRaven64]

Option 3:

Have a day when everyone in the country sends an SMS to their senator and their representative and see how long the practice is allowed to stand when every politician has mobile phone bills in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Re:Math is HARD

[Luyseyal]

While greed is always a factor with big corporations, many of the charges put in place have primary purpose of keeping capacity in check. While the marketing folk at big telecomm corporations love the word "unlimited" it creates nightmares for the engineering folk who find that their SS7 network completely congested. They investitage and find that while it was designed to carry 30 SMSs per day for the 30 million subscribers for which it was scaled is now at it's limit because of an open source project that breaks up TCP packets and transmits them over SMS and allows people to download pr0n to their restrictive countries over SMS.

Do you have a URL for an article that states that the SMS network is so overwhelmed with text messages that all non-unlimited (limited) customers must subsidize their unlimited brethren at an incredible mark-up?

'Cause, really, I think it makes far more sense that carriers abuse their captive audience with outrageous pricing of extremely inexpensive commodity SMS service. But I've been wrong before.

Cheers,
-l

Re:Math is HARD, idiocy comes natural

[cluckshot]

Somebody is loopy! SMS may be charged a lot for and well these charges are high but the cost of SMS is exactly a grand total of NOTHING.

I know you are probably asking how and that is quite simple. Your cell phone transmits a 256 byte message very regularly to the receiving tower and it transmits a corresponding message back to you regularly. This is how your cell phone connects to the network and how they know you are able to receive calls etc. This message has 186 bytes of blank space in it .... unless .... you put an SMS message out or they transmit one to you. SMS rides in this carrier byte packet. As such it costs the network exactly nothing and uses no bandwidth that isn't already in use even if nobody ever sent an SMS message.

So this gets really nice for the company. They bill astronomically for a "Free Good" and we stupidly allow them to bill us for this. SMS should be 100% free with cell phone service. Even the message handling costs are insignificant world wide for this and nobody should ever be billed for it. Of course we stupidly allow them to sell it and we of course buy it stupidly.