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What does 40 megabytes get me?

Sprint's 'Flexible Data Plan' is $39.99/month and targets customers whose data usage varies month-to-month. The plan requires a 2-year contract and only includes 40MB of total usage per month. Everything over the allotted 40MB is billed at $.001 per Kilobyte up to the maximum monthly charge of $99.99. The Sprint unlimited plan is $59.99/month.

Some folks think that this plan would work for them since they consider themselves 'average' and all they do is 'routine' email and surf websites.

Here is a chart showing what 40MB represents:

According to nielsen-netratings.com, the average websurfer in the U.S. loads 1,500+ web pages per month. Many popular webpages are so loaded with files that each one accounts for 100-200KB of data downloaded. This means that on average, a typical user will download over 20MB of data just doing 'routine' web surfing.

Now let's elaborate on email, because you can't only count the ones you want to receive. Spam that makes it to your computer and ends up in your junk folder or spam filter has still taken up bandwidth that Sprint counts toward your quota. If you receive a lot of spam (many people receive 20-50 a day!) you're paying for bandwidth you don't even want!

We would be remiss to forget about major software updates for your computer. They don't happen daily, could easily be over 40MB all by themselves, and have been known to happen several times a month. If you use your 'Flexible' plan to do your software updates, they will be expensive downloads.

Its obvious that the activities which consume the most bandwidth involve music and video downloads. If you plan on downloading music or videos, you really should not consider the 'Flexible' plan as a viable option.

It should be pretty clear by now: for the majority of people, its all too easy to reach the flexible plan's 40MB quota in one month.

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