Since I'm someone who doesn't ever even use wireless internet (and I guess is not therefore part of "everybody"), could someone indicate how much a typical user uses in a month?I've had my iPhone for about a year and I think I make pretty heavy use of it. I download and use a lot of apps, especially when I'm on the road and bored. I use it a LOT to keep up on email and review various web stuff while it's under development. I listen to last.fm streams, and so on. When I'm traveling it's usually my only link with client projects that are changing rapidly. I also use it to push content to Flickr when I want to stay active but don't have my full sized camera with me. I'll upload three minute long movies to YouTube and occasionally do short streaming videocasts with uStream.
I restored my phone about a month ago and I just checked my usage. 2.5GB in about a month.I'm curious - what is it that you're doing with your phone? I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to, just trying to figure out what usage pattern puts someone so much higher than me in the bits-per-month realm.
Dear nascent moguls of cloud computing: a metered internet will either kill your dreams stone dead, or stunt them into starveling, flickering wraiths of the glorious gleams that twinkle in your eyes.I think it's really unlikely that people are going to give up their home internet connections, and wifi for their phones at home/work. This really only applies to people on the go. Maybe for people who take a train to work, this is a big deal, but I think for most people mobile internet isn't all that big of a deal.
And of course, none of this will do anything to curb abuse by people who jailbreak to tether. They'll just stay on the $30/5GB plan (or the iPad $30/unlimited plan), jailbreak to tether, and merrily consume tons of bandwidth.Well, I thought the whole point of the iPad was that it replaced your PC for web surfing, so a tethered iPad shouldn't use too much more bandwidth then a regular PC, right? Unless you're torrenting like crazy. Surfing in a phone isn't really that much fun, compared to a nice monitor, but surfing on a tablet could be pretty reasonable.
"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order./derail
Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can't discern. Says Reed: "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."
The point, by the way, or my point anyway, isn't (so much) the amount charged. It's how it's being charged. The sheer unfairness of slapping overage fees on you without warning you you're about to go over (much as banks have taken to doing, thanks) has been noted aboveI'm not sure if it's been noted during this thread, but the new tiered approach comes with automatic SMS and/or email notifications at the 50, 75, and 100% marks as well as 75% of each over-the-limit gigabyte.
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posted by edgeways at 10:08 AM on June 3, 2010