A company’s telephone exchange digitizes telephone channels at 8000 smp/s, using 8 bits for quantization. This telephone exchange must transmit simultaneously 24 of these telephone channels over a communications link.

a. What’s the required data rate?

b. In order to provide answering-machine service, the telephone exchange can store 3-minute audio messages of the same quality as that of the telephone channels.

How many megabytes of data storage space are needed to store each of these audio messages?