Will I go past 5GB? Click for vagueness.

gravy · EVDO Newbie Joined: 10 Jun 2008 Posts: 2

I know this is probably an impossible question to answer. I'm holding off on buying the Verizon equipment until I ascertain whether or not I'll be going over the 5 GB limit.

I mainly surf. News, pics, YouTube, etc. I'm currently on dialup, so it's hard to determine how much I'd actually be uploading/downloading, etc., since I grow frustrated pretty easily.

I don't game online, or download BitTorrent, or anything else very intensive. I've downloaded BitMeter on my laptop to see what kind of usage I've been going through while on dial-up, and it's been pretty tame. Over the past four days I've had a total used bandwith of 192 MB.

Of course, I haven't seen any video over those last four days since dial-up really doesn't lend itself to that.

Think I'll be able to stay under 5GB?

dan1101 · EVDO User Joined: 17 May 2007 Posts: 67

4,000,000,000 bytes is a lot of data, I think you'd be ok.

A 3 minute YouTube video is about 8 MB, so you could watch about 500 a month, 16 per day.

Normal web surfing won't involve that much data, unless you're looking at a lot of high-resolution pictures or something.

gohawk08 · EVDO Heavy User Joined: 24 Mar 2008 Posts: 103

Hi,
Here's what I have to say about this..
Well, I have sprint mobile broadband, and as you may have noticed, there is a rumor that the 5GB cap will now be enforced (whether it is actually enoforced is still up in the air)
So I downloaded a bandwidth monitor to see just if I'll have to stop using sprint as my primary internet connection. Coming from AOL dialup, EVDO is a god send.

So what I have noticed is actually, online gaming like xbox live, don't take up as much bandwidth per hour. I guess this is becasue xbox live is just KB per second rate and to watch youtube you basically download the enitre video to watch, which can be many megabytes for just one video.

Well, when I started monitoring I made it a point to stay under the 170 mb a day limit. That was pretty easy for me. However after about 6 days of that I got to tired of not being able to do as much surfing, gaming, youtube as I could. So I decided to use as much bandwidth as I could just to see how far over the limit I would be. I figured, I still have unlimited, why not use it? So now my usage per day varies quite a lot, It is always close to 100mb, but for some reason, yesturday was 500mb! That's 3 days worth over. I do everyday tasks like email, checking stuff, and on average 2 youtube videos and about an hour of xbox live a day. And If you stick to about that, you won't go over the limit.
_________________
- Henry

Alex

gravy · EVDO Newbie Joined: 10 Jun 2008 Posts: 2

Thanks all, I really appreciate the input.

james_the_composer · EVDO User Joined: 24 Oct 2007 Posts: 29

I'd say look at it like 1.25 GB a week instead of 160MB a day.

Limited Use:

Game Patches (MMORPG Updates)
Full Games
Youtube.com

Decent Use:

Multiplayer Games/Xbox Live
Surfing
Downloading small files

Can't Use:

Veoh.com can put you over 160MB in less than 10 minutes.
Full Movies

Just use Dial-up for 3 days of the week and you've got 1.25 GB to use in 4 days time.

jz166 · EVDO Newbie Joined: 05 Oct 2008 Posts: 3

Basically I wanna find out the same thing.

I am daytrading equities. I will use laptop+verizon to trade and get real time streaming quotes from my broker (Interactive Broker); but I won't use any charting software on it.

Will 5GB be enough for me?

Thanks!

dan1101 · EVDO User Joined: 17 May 2007 Posts: 67

RTompkins3 · EVDO Newbie Joined: 10 Jun 2005 Posts: 8

I use a product by the name of dumeter - it's a little app that runs and records how much data goes in and out of your computer, and the time that you are connected to "dial up" (which includes the evdo cards). You can break out the usage by hour, day, week and month. With the hourly you can export the data and filter out any "non connected" time and get the usage that way. You can find it at http://www.dumeter.com/?LangID=EN.
I have found it very useful, and my highest months were around 9 gb, when I donloaded the DVD's for fedora a couple of times (no, this was on my cable connection) Very Happy