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General discussion

2 GB should be more than enough for any normal user, right?

Jun 6, 2010 4:56AM PDT

Discussion is locked

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2 GB should be more than enough for any normal user, right?
Jun 6, 2010 7:18AM PDT

Yes it should be unless you stream every thing from TWIT then no.

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2GB Per Month = 65MB per day average
Jun 12, 2010 1:34PM PDT

If you stream audio podcasts, you will blow through 65 MB per day easily. Some web pages that may only be less than 1 MB per page will add up quickly if you browse around alot.
I wanted to get an iPhone so I could stream podcasts over 3g on my commute home, such as BOL and others, but it seems too risky that I will exceed the cap.
There is no WIFI allowed at work and BOL and the other podcasts I use for my commute are published too late in the day for me to try to rush over to Starbucks to sync over their free WIFI during lunch, so I just won't be able to do it and I don't have time to listen to it after I get home.
I can't install iTunes or other software on my work PC to sync with a USB cable either.
Is there any way to sync podcasts to an iPhone without installing software on the PC?

Maybe there will need to be lower quality 16-bit audio podcasts available to minimize size of streams and downloads (like dial-up days).
I wonder how much bandwidth Stitcher radio uses per hour?

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Well
Jun 12, 2010 2:19PM PDT

That's kind of the whole point, make heavy uses think twice to reduce load on the network. Note it's only $10 per 1GB over 2GB.

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Low Bandwidth audio feeds needed
Jun 12, 2010 2:55PM PDT

I'm not talking about people streaming Pandora, Netflix and Youtube all day long. Just listening to some freshly posted podcasts on a commute and web browsing through the day is enough to still have to worry about the cap.

This cap will hurt services providing streaming and download audio services if people have to adjust their listening habits to fit the quota.
The only thing many users can do about it is stop listening to stay under the cap and the provider loses those listeners.

TWIT used to offer a low bandwidth audio bandwidth RSS feed for dialup http://www.leoville.tv/podcasts/twit-low.xml but they killed it last year because almost everyone listening is now on broadband or 3G phones. On that feed a 90 minute podcast was about 11MB
They should bring that back and CNET should offer a low bandwidth 16kps RSS audio podcast feed also.
Buzz Out Loud audio download is often over 30MB for just that one 40 minute podcast. That's alot if you are working with 65MB for your entire data limit for that day and you need to do other things that use bandwidth that day. BOL could probably be cut down to about 5 MB for the same length with a lower quality feed. Audio quality isn't as important for talk podcasts as for music and the normal quality feed could still be available for WIFI or PC use.
Forgot those on the 200MB plan.

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do you honestly use more than 2GB/month?
Jun 6, 2010 7:32AM PDT

I dunno, I think that stinks too, but, seriously, do you? I'm pretty sure I don't...

I guess if you use your phone as your sole internet access device and tether at home for all your downloading and video streaming, then that makes sense, but outside of that, how would you get to 2gb/month? please correct me if im wrong, cuz I'd like to have a better idea of how much data im really using...

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I don;t use more than 2GB a month... on a phone.
Jun 6, 2010 11:08AM PDT

But on an tablet, netbook or a laptop who knows? The use cases are very different. I never stream video on a phone. I do it all the time on my iPad. I never think about downloading a movie from iTunes to watch on my iPhone. But I can see myself doing it a lot on a larger screen.

I'm just saying that we may think 2GB is plenty. But that's based on right here right now on a 3.5 inch phone. Not 6 months or a year from now on 10 inch tablets that are designed as <i>media consumption devices</i>. And I don't have faith in the wireless carriers to do right by their customers. They are going to LOVE being able to get hefty overages from all their data accounts.

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point well taken!
Jun 9, 2010 11:50AM PDT

touche, sir.

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Well...
Jun 6, 2010 8:23AM PDT

Now the customers get to feel the shock AT&T did when all these data hog iPhone users joined their network. Wink
Come on, they sold unlimited connections when they know they can't handle it. They should have had caps from the beginning.

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And the carriers will get to feel the shock of the FCC when
Jun 6, 2010 11:19AM PDT

they come asking why consumers are being forced to pay twice to access a finite amount of data they have already paid to access once.

They might have been able to justify these tethering fees when they had "unlimited" plans but there is absolutely no excuse for this now other than greed and collusion (convenient how all the carriers are switching to this new pay twice model).

And the big content providers who want us to consumer freely are not going to like this move one bit. Don;t be surprised when one or many of them write letters to the DOJ suggesting an investigation a la Adobe and Apple.

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Good publicity for AT&T??
Jun 8, 2010 2:09AM PDT

So does the fact that there can even be data hogs that use over the 5GB 'unlimited' limit on the AT&T network in the first place mean that the network actually works in certain areas?

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The network works fine for me. never had a problem with 3G
Jun 8, 2010 4:37AM PDT

Its calls that suck on AT&T in my area. 5 full bars and still 30% of your calls drop. Its literally like stepping back into the dark ages of analog phones.

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Its already starting.
Jun 8, 2010 4:42AM PDT
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07data.html

What's good for AT&T's bottom line is not necessarily good for customers or the health of the wireless internet industry on a whole. Which would be fine if we had other choices, but it looks like all the carriers are going to go the same route.

I wonder how Apple feels about thee caps now that they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a new data center that will likely be used to push out more cloud based entertainment services?
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I'm rethinking this again.
Jun 10, 2010 10:11AM PDT

Although I still think charging a 20 dollar fee to simply activate tethering (and it should be wifi, not bluetooth or cable based) is sleazy (either I paid for the data or I didn't, you can;t have it both ways AT&T), I'm beginning to think that AT&T's new plans aren;t all that bad when you look at the big picture.

I did a test by turning on the 3G radio on my iPad last Saturday. So far I've used 280MB of data (a magazine download and a bit of Netflix and Pandora streaming. Pandora uses approximately 60MB/hour and Netflix uses about 190 MB/hr. I could easily see going over the 2GB limit at this rate. But is this rate normal for me? probably not. And even if it was the overages are not as bad as I thought (10 dollars for every extra GB... not 25 like I initially thought). So while you may go over every once in a while and have to fork over 5 to 15 dollars more than you did on an unlimited plan, there will likely be lots of months where you'll be under and save some money. Plus the ability to turn the iPad 3G on and off at will is pretty handy and will save you even more. Should you want it, 5GB of data will cost you 55 dollars which is still cheaper than a mi-fi plan./ And then there is wifi which I have at work and at home so the scenarios in which I wrack up huge data bills are not going to be that commonplace.

So in the end it could be a wash, even for heavy data users. We'll see, I'm still testing it all out (and I haven't given up my unlimited data just yet. But I might just do that if I'm not likely to get any ugly bills.

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Yeah
Jun 10, 2010 12:08PM PDT

I think the cap is actually pretty generous, especially the cheap overage charges compared to Australian carriers which have had caps for ages and charge you like 10 cents a MB when you're over... I'm currently paying about $20USD for 2GB, but if I go over... it's expensive.
Clearly the tethering fee is to discourage use of tethering, because tethering users are going to use more data and more of their cap.
The only real criticism I have, is more of Apple. And that is that they have not added in a feature to the iPad to connect via bluetooth and pair with an iPhone and use it's tethering feature. It's kind of silly to be forced to have two data plans, when you could just pay $20 for tethering and use the iPhone's 3G connection.
And this is not AT&T, this is Apple. A feature that's missing from iOS.