With all these bandwidth discussions did a little testing

[FX4]

I tether once in a while. It's not a regular thing for me, but here and there I need it. Verizon tech originally told me to use PDANet but now paid tethering is available so I thought well maybe I should just pay for the service. I look at the plan and it's 20.00 for 2Gigs. I'm thinking 10.00 for a Gig, are they on crack? So I did a little testing and here is what I found:

One day:
Watched one, one hour netflix television show
Two hours of XM radio
Update to PC
email all day
surfing six hours, a couple of random video clips

Day Two
Repeat above

This worked out to 880Mb or so. So basically at this level of use which I would consider a couple of medium days for me I would burn up 2 Gigs in about 5 days. I would jump on a 10Gig plan which after testing I think is reasonable. As it stands now I'll just leave things as I have them. I thought the 5Gig plan was a little thin but these 2gig and 2.5gigs plans are a joke. I'm not going to spend my hard earned money for that kind of bandwidth when traveling, I'll just buzz my rear down to Mickey Ds or whoever has free wireless where I'm at if I really need the net for a large download or whatever. IMO they are getting $50.00 (30 + 20) it really should be unlimited. Don't you get your home service for around 50.00 and it's unlimited? Fortunately a lot more hotels are offering free wireless these days so this is becoming less of an issue.

 

[dezymond]

your little experiment is very helpful. you seem to be a pretty medium user when it comes to using the internet and i thought it would be well past 1gb of data, but it didn't hit 1gb.

considering you could just use pdanet, if I were you I would just stick with that. Some people can justify the tethering plan, but I'll stick to using easytether =P Already payin $30 for unlimited, don't see why verizon needs more of my money to provide a service that should already be thrown into the current data plan