Data

0’s & 1’s. Numbers that represent such tiny amounts it staggers the mind how much they can add up to in a month. So much in fact that data caps and tiered service plans  are likely to emerge with wireless carriers, though AT&T has already crossed this barrier. This reminds me back when AOL had tiered plans for connection time. Remember the 5 free hours a week? Anything over that meant additional charges. This was a lot of fun in my house, we were a family of five. In short it meant only jumping on and grabbing one’s email. This became problematic when one of my college professors, who saw the future and attempted to make it the present, required us to do on line research. Up went the AOL bill.
 
Eventually, as we all know, this capped usage went away. Call it the golden age of web surfing. Suddenly my web use went up from an hour or so a week (once the afore mentioned college class ended) to a dozen, to 2 dozen, and has settled to somewhere around 20 per week. 
 
Enter the wireless world. Smart phones and data plans were original born in this all you can eat world of web surfing. To be fair the smart phones were very limited in what they could do, the networks were not as robust, nor did they necessarily have the ability to stream media heavy data. This has of course changed in recent years and data usage on mobile devices is, to be cliché, skyrocketing. In my case my data usage has moved from my stay at home PC to my go everywhere I go smartphone. In checking my account this month in the first 20 days I have consumed 225MB of data, and this does not include my usage at home where my data consumption goes through my home network. 
 
Perhaps the telco’s sense a chance to earn a largerprofit from it user base, perhaps it is a method to throttle usage and thereby not clog data stream. Perhaps it is a little from both hands, perhaps, perhaps and perhaps. Choose your reason, or even create your own (to many goats on the moon?) the golden age of web surfing (at least through mobile) is coming to end. At least until free wifi  is everywhere. 
 
Inquire at your about wifi. If they have it take advantage of your mobile surfing there, and if it is during the summer enjoy the ac while you are there.
 
For further reading
Data Usage
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