It's only been 12 days since the beginning of October and I've already used 8GB of data. Granted 7GB of this was over WiFi, but for most people that other 999MB is half of their data plan. So, how and why would I burn through so much data without a care?
I don't roam outside of Silicon Valley very much. I tend to stick around the valley about 85% of the time, and my carrier (T-Mobile) has decent coverage throughout the South Bay (of San Francisco). I usually get about 25 Mbps down and 8 Mbps up, but unlike most mobile users I won't blow through my data cap in 20 minutes at that rate. In fact it would take about 5 weeks of non-stop downloading at that speed to reach my cap.
What is my cap, you say? Well, not to brag or anyth... ok I'm bragging. It's 10 TERABYTES. Yeah, Ten Thousand Gigabytes, or Ten Million Megabytes. Or really, since we measure data rates in Megabits per second (Mbps), its 80 Million Megabits.
I'm sure that this ridiculously high cap was put in place so that people would not try to hit infinity. I can actually imagine what T-mobile would say to me were I to come even close to 1 TB of data transfer in a month. It would be something like, "Hey, we've noticed that you're using a good deal of data, would you mind telling us what you're doing?" Although the image at the top shows only 8GB of transfer this month, it's nowhere close to the most I've used. So far, and I don't have the screenshots, I've maxed out at 84GB for the month. It was 47GB over WiFi and 37GB over 4G LTE. I'm not sure about the caps for AT&T and Verizon, but I would guess that 37GB of mobile data would cost more than $100, I paid $20.
If you don't like in place where you can get T-Mobile coverage, I would like to offer my condolences. But if you do, and you don't have T-mobile, consider this a public service announcement. T-mobile has no contracts, no early termination fees, and No Limits on Data. And now no fees for going overseas. What more could you ask for? (Better coverage, of course).
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