Wireless Bandwidth Limits

Now that I've confirmed that AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint no longer offer unlimited data plans for their Broadband wireless cards (Sprint being the exception with their 4G network), I've decided to figure out if 5GB is enough for a serious connection. I downloaded AnalogX Netstat Live onto my X90. It will monitor my network bandwidth usage. So far, after 5 minutes of usage I am at 7.3MB. Please note, this is a BIG B, not a little b. We are talking in Bytes, not bits, since that data plans are rated in Bytes. (For those less geeky than I, that's an 8X difference.)

I'm now going to try to watch a movie on YouTube and see how much bandwidth that consumes....

OK. I only got 1/2 way through a video and the performance was so bad I had to stop. However, my bandwidth usage went from 7.5MB to 40.2MB.

I'm gonna let this tool run for a few days and calculate my bandwidth usage. It'll be interesting to see how much bandwidth I really use.

Just for fun, I've included an image from Sprint's site that explains what you can do with 5GB:



Speaking of bandwidth, I just ran my send backup using Avamar and it took less than a minute. Once this experiment is over, I'm going to re-test this with my Lenovo T500.