Magic 3G and transfer limits
Posted July 2nd, 2009 in Outsourcing IT by Wojtek GurgulI have spent last 5 days in the hospital together with my son. He’s OK now, but of course it wasn’t really fun. Luckily he was doing pretty well from the second day of our stay there, so I could be more or less be in touch with the world. When you have your mobile and PC – who cares where you are?
As always I was using my 3G card in my laptop. I was (again) amazed by the quality and speed I was getting from it. The speed was pretty much like the one I have at home. More than enough. I use the card rarely – only if I travel in Poland for more than a day. If I go abroad I never use it because roaming is way too expensive. If I travel just for one day – my Omnia is all I need.
My son was playing a bit on-line (some simple flash games) one day, and I was downloading my mail, browsing the net. Nothing special. Oh yes – I did talk with my daughter over Skype with video on. The quality was excellent. The next day we had a training in the office which we broadcasted through MS LiveMeeting using our beloved Microsoft Roundtable (now called Polycom CX5000 Unified Conference Station for Microsoft Unified Communications). I was able to observe the training and participate in the discussion. That lasted 3 hours. Suddenly Internet speed became very slow. I had to disconnect. Nothing helped. As the weather was awful I was thinking that maybe storm caused 3G not working as it should. After a few hours I got SMS from our mobile provided that I exceeded the transfer limit and I need to send premium SMS to get extra traffic allowance. Otherwise my speed will be limited to almost zero. I got mad. I did send this silly SMS and bought extra 128 MB of transfer. Of course meanwhile I missed the rest of the session. How silly I was. I did reset the counter in my software which connects me using 3G card. After less than half of the day I realized that I used almost the whole extra limit. And I wasn’t doing nothing spectacular. No video calls (some short audio), e-mail, Internet etc. Simply regular stuff. That was an eye opener for me. Who today cares how much data will fly through the wires when portals are designed? Who cares about the size of the e-mail attachments? Cable modems, DSLs got so fast that nobody cares! The amount of data which used to be more than your hard disk now flies through your Internet connection every day. And of course you don’t think about it at all. Why would you? I did consume 1 GB of transfer in less than 2 days! Yes I know – not everybody uses video conferencing over the net. But everybody watches youtube, right?
I’m going to be much more patient now when my team comes back to me again to upgrade the Internet link at PGS. I’m as guilty as everybody else, even though I rarely watch youtube in the office. But I love Roundtable!
