I live for 2 months out of the year on a completely metered Verizon data plan (mifi). Managing it with our home business (small biz web design) and 2 connected kids is ... a royal pain to say the least.
When we arrive the routine goes like this:
Airplane mode for all phones/tablets unless in use
Turn off Dropbox syncing (all devices)
Turn off Backblaze (cost us about $100 in data last time we forgot to completely disable)
iOS updates for our 4 smartphones? Wait until we return home
Disable app updates (some are several hundred MB)
No Pandora/Sirius streaming or audio streaming of any kind
Limited Netflix/Video streaming (only for must watch shows)
No large FTP transfers (common for our industry)
No Facetime (our kids use)
Schedule Dropcam power to turn off at night
Block podcast downloads within iTunes
The list goes on....
So basically every day you check, and recheck your data use to "catch" any device or service that may be using too much data. When family visits and the number inside the house reaches 6-10 the monthly data cap is blown in just a few days.
And our data cap is not a measly 5GB or even 10GB a month, it can easily reach 40-50GB which costs a relative fortune.
If you look at the list of accommodations above, you'll see a nice collection of US businesses (Apple, Dropbox, Pandora etc.) for whom I can't do business with in a "metered" world.
I can deal with this for 2 months out of my year, but if my home residential Internet was also metered like this our involvement online would be dramatically changed.
I just recently experienced something like this on a work trip I turned on my mifi and forgot I had my nexus tablet in my backpack. When I woke up in the morning and the tablet had upgraded itself eating through a whole month of usage and then some... Granted we didn't have a big plan for the mifi but still we had to upgrade to a higher fixed per month rate.. I would be OK with variable usage based billing but having to have a fixed fee use it or lose it really is what kills these plans... and makes for such a bad customer experience IMO.
Thankfully "upgrading" your data plan with Verizon is easy, but the pricing is still exorbitant.
The "overnight" data usage by services is actually very interesting. Often I would go to sleep well under my daily goal, and wake up to a "mysterious" 2GB transfer around midnight-2 AM. the usage wasn't nefarious in nature, however the timing (middle of the night) made it difficult to manage.
I have the same issue with a vacation home. I have Little Snitch installed on my Mac which allows me to disable Dropbox and stuff like that automatically when connected to that network. It would be great if there were a feature in iOS to treat certain wifi networks as a 4g connection and disable the app updates and other things it typically only does over wifi.
If Internet providers move to metered access the only bright spot in the industry will be the need for software, and hardware to limit, throttle and manage your personal data use (what a future!)
Specifically with smartphones- the built in controls to keep you from blowing through your cellular data plan don't apply when your wifi...is connected to a meted plan. So your device thinks "I'm on wi-fi, update all the things" yet the connection still "cellular".
It would be a sad day in tech when your device OS has to implement an "airplane-esq" mode for metered connections that drops all data-intensive usage and maybe only allows certain notifications through.
This exists. Every reletively new Android product (>=4.1) has "Mobile hotspots" under "Data usage".
> Network bandwidth management: New API provides ability to detect metered networks, including tethering to a mobile hotspot.
Mark the WiFi access points you want to be low data usage and you are good to go. Software that plays nice will use the "isActiveNetworkMetered()" to check if they should download or not.
No disagreement that wireless ISP pricing is even more outrageous, but it's a bit ironic to me that the complaint is regarding $50 in the context of "at my vacation home".
When we arrive the routine goes like this:
Airplane mode for all phones/tablets unless in use Turn off Dropbox syncing (all devices) Turn off Backblaze (cost us about $100 in data last time we forgot to completely disable) iOS updates for our 4 smartphones? Wait until we return home Disable app updates (some are several hundred MB) No Pandora/Sirius streaming or audio streaming of any kind Limited Netflix/Video streaming (only for must watch shows) No large FTP transfers (common for our industry) No Facetime (our kids use) Schedule Dropcam power to turn off at night Block podcast downloads within iTunes The list goes on....
So basically every day you check, and recheck your data use to "catch" any device or service that may be using too much data. When family visits and the number inside the house reaches 6-10 the monthly data cap is blown in just a few days.
And our data cap is not a measly 5GB or even 10GB a month, it can easily reach 40-50GB which costs a relative fortune.
If you look at the list of accommodations above, you'll see a nice collection of US businesses (Apple, Dropbox, Pandora etc.) for whom I can't do business with in a "metered" world.
I can deal with this for 2 months out of my year, but if my home residential Internet was also metered like this our involvement online would be dramatically changed.