Help! How much is 100 megs?
 

Ok. ATT has a wireless card for laptops that offers 100 megabytes a month download (or how ever they measure that stuff) for $89. Sprint is $99 unlimited.

How much is 100 megs? If I am just checking email, hotmail, and surfing FT for a few hours every day, will I blow by the 100 meg limit? Note that I won't be downloading large files or anything, just reading and replying and mostly (lets be real) surfing the net.

Thanks!

Edited to add, I do know how much a 100 megs is, but have no idea whether that is a lot by the way ATT measures me surfing the net and viewing web pages like FT.

[This message has been edited by auh2o (edited 01-14-2003).]

T-Mobile gives some rough numbers on this page:

http://www.t-mobile.com/help/services/tz/rateinfo.asp

To get a "real" sense of what this means, may be best just to experiment. If you currently have a dialup account, there's probably some sort of monitor that tracks how much data is up/downloaded in that session. The Windows utility tracks it (at least in W2K). You could do some tests to get a sense of how much you're using up. I think I go through a MB every 20-30 minutes but, as you can imagine, it's highly variable.

I do some wireless stuff several times a week, mainly email, IM and some web surfing and I usually stay around to 50mb a month. Some handy tips when surfing on the road are to turn off images, music etc... I actually have a seperate username made in WindowsXP for when I'm on the road with IE setup to download as little as possible.

Unlimited > 100mb

But also $99 > $89 http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttr...orum/smile.gif

Question is:

Value_auh2o(100 AT&T MB) - $89 <> Value_auh2o(Unlimited Sprint MB) - $99

As you know JOhn I have the Sprint card and I use about 500 meg per month, but I also sync mail. FYI, the Sprint service works REALLY well.

An easy way to figure out usage is to use the netstat command from a command prompt (assuming you're not using a Mac). Reboot your computer to reset the stats to zero, go to a command prompt, and enter "netstat -e". You'll see the number of bytes you've received. 100MB would show as 100000000.

FORGET the AT&T card. Their GSM coverage is nowhere near as extensive as Sprint's and even if it was, GPRS is not as fast as CDMA 1xRTT. IMO, I'd go with either Sprint or Verizon. Verizon has better network performance (lower latency, etc) but Sprint has a wider coverage area (entire network is 1x vs. quite a bit of the network for Verizon). I have all of the above and my usage is split equally between Sprint and Verizon. Also, 100MB gets eaten up rather quickly. A few large Email attachments and you're there.

Thanks all. I went with Sprint. The clincher was ATT's card was $299, Sprint, $199. And then to top it all off, ATT told me that my corporate discount does not apply to the monthy data bill as it does not cover GSM yet. Sprint happily honored the corporate discount (although it is a much smaller discount).