Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) is a signal modulation technique that uses both frequency shift keying and amplitude modulation. QAM16 is a version, where a transmittedsymbol can encode 16 different possibilities (i.e., a single transmitted symbol can be seen tocontain four bits of data). The original alphabet is 8bits long, with values between 0 and 255(a byte).

What is the maximum expected code length in number of QAM16 symbols (assuming that the appearance probabilities over the original alphabet have the worst distribution possible)?