SMS costs more than Hubble
Leicester boffin complains
SMS MESSAGING COSTS punters more to use than downloading data directly from the Hubble Space telescope.
Not that many people are likely to download Hubble data, but the figures were used by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme 'The Mobile Phone Rip-Off' to show how phone companies were tucking up their punters.
University of Leicester space scientist Dr Nigel Banister 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 that that texting is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble.
Basically the figures are thus. A text message is 160 characters, which takes up 140 bytes. A million SMS messages can be contained in a megabyte and at 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB.
This is 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs which are about £85 a megabyte, if you take into account the ground stations and the cost of chocolate biscuits for the operators.
L'Inq
Physorg
Comments
Text Mad
Generally text at 10p a go is the cheapest way to use UK PAYG phones -- that's twice the cost of a 5 minute landline voice call.The mobile phone companies all rely on ultra-confusing tarrifs and linking the supply of hardware to the supply of service, disguising the cost of both.
Their latest answer to a saturated market is to offer PAYG phones for next to nothing (in one recent case free, but frequently for as little at £14.99 including £10 airtime).
It's a start -- but in the wrong direction.
The hardware needs to be sold separately at realistic prices by independent retailers. The phone companies will have to be directed to produce transparent tarrifs -- which actually reflect the cost of providing the service.
In the case of text the cost is clearly nil.
Expensive texting
5p a message sound a bit too expensive for my taste.I Denmark the price is 1-2p a peace and only if you pay-per-message which I don't.
I pay about 5£/month for unlimited use of texting which equals doing more than 500 messages/month before that price is a win-win for me.
Since I don't use texting that much any more I'll pay the 1-2p a message atm.
Cash cow
5p per text is average if you don't text much and therefore can't use packages that conveniently expire every month - some companies charge 12p for a single text.Portugal is significantly cheaper than the Danish price ~ 10 times cheaper than the UK cash cow prices.
Forgive me if i'm wrong
but isn't a megabyte 1048576 bytes? And therefore you'd be able to contain 1048576 / 140 = 7489 messages in a megabyte, not a million as quoted (even though the figure of £374.45 is correct)Stupid comparison
The comparison of per byte Hubble data and Text data is ridiculous. Its oranges vs apples as the saying goes.The data component of a Text message is not considered by the operator; it is the provision of a platform that can process thousands of SMS per second under peak load, geographic network coverage, national or international roaming, customer support and a system that 'just works' that customers are paying for.
While I am sure many will argue items in that list are useless or broken that is indeed what you are paying 5p for - not the amount of data transfered.
funny math
Wait a sec, if a message is 140 bytes, how the heck do you fit a million of them in 1 meg? 1048576/140 = 7490 text messages. The £374.49 figure is still correct though. And it sounds like he's assuming that text messages are sent in 7bit ascii but I bet it's sent in UTF8 or something. Well, that wouldn't make much of a difference anyway.In Switzerland is even bigger rip-off
What we should say from Switzerland, one SMS is 20 cents Suisse which is about 8p. MMS are even bigger reap off. All telecoms are making huge amounts of money. I red somewhere that voice communication on mobile should be cheaper on normal land lines, but of course we pay the opposit. They have monopoly and they are taking profit. Just as petrol companies with gas.Its pays my salary
Texting pays my salary. It s a big business and their is too much at stake. The mobile networks take up the lions share ... premium rated text-msgs (sms's).Pocket Money
Taking those figures and doubling the end result (since no-where have I seen a text go for as little as 5p), if the cost of data on the interwibbles was charged the same, it would cost billions for those of us running even low-end dedicated servers. £2.6bn actually for just one of my servers' monthly bandwidth usage. I'd hate to see Google's bill.Why PAYG?
If you use your phone for any time at all (calls or texts) in a month you're better off on contract, so the whole PAYG point is irrelevant. I replace my phone an up-to-date phone (MDA Touch at the moment) every year for which I pay nothing, but I do pay a fixed monthly price for the contract. Except that includes all the calls and texts I can possibly make in a monthvs
Paying for a phone on PAYG (or buying it independently without the subsidy) and paying for calls and texts at insane rates on top.
Oh, and I get a couple of GB of data download included in that contract so I can VOIP/message/IM/browse internet etc for no extra cost.