Categories
Gadgets Internet Websites

How much bandwidth does your cell service provider give you?

Will Work for Bandwidth
Will Work for Bandwidth

Do you know how much bandwidth your cell phone provider gives you on your mobile phone contract?

We know – why does it matter how much our providers charge us for bandwidth?  The Internet is free, right?

Yeah… not so much.

Every phone contract has some description about how much bandwidth that you can use.  The latest Apple iPhone 4S has an app called SIRI… where recent news reports show that it can suck up your data usage plan by as much as three times what those same phone users would normally use without SIRI.

Web Watch has a friend with the exact same phone as us, and they’re continually complaining about their battery life, while our battery can give us a full day’s worth of online activity and then some.  We took a look at their phone settings, and they have all their apps continually checking for new data and updates throughout the day.  Just turning off the activesync on their phone would probably save them a ton of battery life… not to mention all that extra data flowing to their phone to let them know about the latest earthquake in Southeastern Asia.

All the more reason why you should be concerned about how much data your cell phone is using when you’re not around (or even when you are).

So what do you need to do?  Just visit WHAT IS MY CAP and select which carrier you’re on and WHAT IS MY CAP will tell you how much content you can download each month before you hit that “free data” limit.

From there, you can tell the site how many additional hours of video you might be interested in watching, and the site will tell you how much that will cost you in overage fees.

For example, on Verizon, just watching one additional hour of HD video (or about 13 albums, if music is your thing) will cost you $10.

Sure, $10 doesn’t seem like a lot for one time… but imagine doing that over and over again, and if everybody was doing it at the same time.  You’d bring the Verizon network down in a jiffy… so you can just imagine what would happen if everybody asked SIRI the same question at the same time, how that could negatively affect the cell network that you’ve all come to rely upon.

So pay attention to what your phone is using and what it is costing you in the end.  Your wallet will thank you for it.