[geeks] Smart phone data usage

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Thu, Jul 07, 2011 at 09:56:22AM -0400, Eric Railine wrote:
>As a belated response:  as a (now) Android user, my typical monthly data
>usage over the last year has been around 425M, but the last two months have
>increased to around 725M.  That's with 2 mail accounts (one very active, one
>not), Twitter, semi-frequent remote desktop sessions (Wyse PocketCloud),
>occasional streaming music/video, frequent web searches, and probably
>averaging 1-2hrs of navigation per week.

Note that the thing that really eats this up is video. So video conferencing
or watching TV will kill your bill. A 360P TV show (45 minutes) is 350meg, 
720P is 1.2G and 1080P is 4.5g. 

Streaming audio or playing your MP3 library over the phone costs too, an
hour of BBC's 32kbitspersecond feed is 14megabytes an hour, a 128k music
feed is 64megabytes.

So literaly one TV show or an hour with YouTube or an afternoon of music
could double your useage. 

I found in April, when I was in the hospital, that due to the poor sustained
data flow my cellular modem provided, it was faster to download a video with
my 15mbit aDSL line to my home and then scp it to my laptop. It probably had
something to do with long TCP ACK times. :-)

I was bored, I used 12g of download in 4 days. All at 360P. :-)

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Making your enemy reliant on software you support is the best revenge.