SMS: Space Messaging Scandal!
by Imran Ali
An interesting study by scientists at the UK’s University of Leicester has concluded that the cost of sending a five-penny text message is at least four-times more than the equivalent exchange with the Hubble Space Telescope…
“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.”
Coverage of this story (TXTING COSTS R $£&+%$*&!, Costs of Text Messaging vs. Space Transmissions and Is Text Messaging a Rip-Off?) all seems to focus on the apparently ’scandalous’ pricing of SMS messages, however is it really fair to compare this to something as niche and narrowly focussed as a 20-year old satellite? Value, not pricing is the real story here.
Market prices for mobile broadband, photo messaging and text messaging all point to an acceptance that pricing for these categories of data transfer provide value for customers. Yes, they could all be cheaper, but these are the prices that people are prepared to pay.
Interplanetary data transfer pricing isn’t a benchmark that’s useful for most people…
