> I don't think you could keep up with app updates alone much less actually "do" anything with only 300 megs/month.
You probably don't want to have automatic over the air app updates enabled. In fact, I'm not even sure if that's an option. Honestly, 300 MB/month would be sufficient for most months even for me, and I'm a fairly heavy user on LTE. I pay for the 2GB plan mostly to cover months where my usage peaks. I suspect that 8 months a year I use less than 300 MB/month, and I use iTunes Match, occasional video streaming, and occasional Facetime calls.
> According to a recent consumer report (pdf) commissioned by networking hardware company Ericsson, the average smartphone owner in the US currently uses around 8GB of data each month.
Whaaaat? I figured that must include Wifi so I looked at the PDF, and no—apparently that's the actual mobile data usage. It's a self-reported survey, but still. Up here in Canada I have a 10GB plan which is more than anyone else I know, and is way, way more than I generally use. The only time I've ever come close is when I've been on vacation and done a bunch of tethering.
I'm not surprised that some people use 8GB per month, but I find it very hard to believe that's anywhere close to a national average, unless usage in the US is dramatically different than in Canada. (I know our cell plans are more expensive so it's probably somewhat different, but that much?)
He didn’t include this in the main tweet, but in his deeper analysis he found on mobile they only send 2.4 mb of resources so, it would only be 2% of your 100 mb cap. Still a lot but you probably shouldn’t be shopping for apple products on that data budget.
The average web page that an Indian mobile user is downloading is CERTAINLY not 2.2 MB. You can't just take a statistic from desktop US-centric sites and generalize it to other nations and usage patterns. Keep in mind that a lot of the advantages of bringing mobile phones and mobile Internet to developing nations is simple text communication -- 500 MB is essentially an unlimited number of texts through apps like WhatsApp.
And anyway, I am a heavy smartphone user here in the US on a data plan I don't pay for (i.e. I never think twice about accessing anything on my phone), and I average 2-3 GB per month, most of which is mobile games (Ingress and Pokemon Go) and viewing images and videos on Reddit. I could easily make do on 500 MB/month if I had to, and the only thing that would be affected is entertainment.
> 2. It will apparently be possible to retroactively upgrade from the 250 MB plan to the 2 GB plan if you're going to be over, so the fears of forgetting that you left Pandora running and paying hundreds seem to be a bit unfounded.
Well... In one of the initial discussions someone did the calculation that if you leave Pandora playing for 40 hours/week, it amounts to 5+GB of data, and that's on the low quality stream.
And too many app developers assume that all their users have massive/unlimited data plans. This is usually correct for... most developed and developing countries, but:
They forget that in the telecom-backwater of Canada, a 4 or 5gb/month plan is near the high end.
I’m looking at you NPR One app for thinking buffering 300-400mb of content is a good idea.
Data point- I never have hit the limit on the $30 T-Mobile plan and use about ~3gb during an average month. I'm connected to wifi at work, home or friend's place ~18hrs a day.
I needed to run mostly on LTE tethered connectivity for a couple of months, and 30 GB a month of data was more than enough for my daily development process, and background youtube music mixes (at lower bitrates).
Unless you're rebuilding containers/redownloading dependecies daily, 15 GB of data should be pretty reasonable.
> Now the only limit are the CPU and RAM available to the browser.
... and in Germany, the data cap if you're on mobile. Video ads with autoplay, tons of trackers, no wonder I regularly hit 3GB a month, which is actually the biggest package my provider offers.
True, but if you're at work it can just go over WiFi (or just use Pandora on your computer). I think it's a bum deal because the terms changed just a month in, but as an iPad owner I'd have to try hard to use 2GB per month outside the range of WiFi.
>Is excess data usage severely penalized financially in other countries?
I believe it depends on ISP and on specific plan.
My mom has an iPad with a limited to 3 Gb/month dataplan (Italy), a couple of times she managed to go beyond the limit (due to some updates she did when not Wi-Fi connected), since it is a sort of pre-paid account, what happened was that the device became slow as molasses, as bandwidth was reduced to the speed of an analogic modem or something like that.
She still had connection, but to access a web page it took like 3 minutes.
On the other hand, she changed phone from a "normal" phone to a "smart" Android one (she was totally unaware of this and didn't realize that the cellular data was on) but her SIM (also pre-paid) did have an on-demand dataplan (never used before on the old phone), very, very costly and she managed to burn 30 out of 50 € of credit in a couple days (without using the internet at all, just through the "pings" (or whatever) the Android did in background).
You probably don't want to have automatic over the air app updates enabled. In fact, I'm not even sure if that's an option. Honestly, 300 MB/month would be sufficient for most months even for me, and I'm a fairly heavy user on LTE. I pay for the 2GB plan mostly to cover months where my usage peaks. I suspect that 8 months a year I use less than 300 MB/month, and I use iTunes Match, occasional video streaming, and occasional Facetime calls.
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