April 23, 2010 11:26am by David Farrar

The cost of text messaging

“According to Nigel Bannister, a scientist at the University of Leicester, sending a text message can be up to four times more expensive than downloading the same amount of data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Sadly it is true.

A text message can be 160 characters, equalling 160 bytes (actually 140 bytes – 160 7-bit characters, so the figures that follow are conservative). Given that a text message costs roughly 20c to send, some simple arithmetic can be used to work out how much it costs per megabyte:

$0.20 / 160 = $0.00125 per byte

$0.00125 x 1024 = $1.28 per kilobyte

$1.28 x 1024 = $1311 per megabyte

If we had to pay text message bandwidth rates for home or office internet connections: downloading a 4Mb song would cost $5244.00, a 500Mb TV episode would cost $655,500 and downloading a 1Gb movie, $1,342,464.”

One nice thing about Blackberries is you can PIN people instead of SMS them, and it costs you nothing. But you need to know their Blackberry PIN.