Saturday, November 17, 2007

Compared to Rogers EDGE system

Rogers data rate is $0.05 per kilobyte. Only a nickel.

But put another way, it is about $50 per megabyte.

If you use the EDGE network to provide Internet access for your laptop, it might cost you about $38 to load the webpage CNN.com (~750KB) just once. If you spend the morning updating your blogs, it might cost you $500. If you install Norton Internet Security and have to download 50MB of updates to get it working, then it might cost you $2500 for that evening's session. If you spent the entire month (24/7) downloading ripped DVDs and so on, then your bill might be about $1,760,000.

In real life, people that are not informed about this issue will typically run up a $300 bill in one day and then be cut-off.

Some people will mention the 'plans'. Yeah, but the monthly bandwidth cap on the typical EDGE plans are so low that you could exceed your limit within an hour or two on the first day of the month. And then you'll be back to (if you're on a plan) their $30 per megabyte rate.

In summary - it might be okay for expensive and highly limited browsing and e-mail on a small-screen smart phone, but no normal human can afford to use the EDGE network for all of their daily Internet access needs.

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