Last year sometime I was regularly getting messages like this from my ISP:
Our system has detected that you have used at least 80% of your included megabytes on your cable modem plan for the billing period 2005-10-24/2005-11-23.
Except that this one arrived today. I’m glad they give me ample warning.
At that time I changed the plan I was on from a pathetic one Gigabyte per month to my current 5Gb. It looks as though it may be time to either prune my downloads or consider a larger plan.
I just grabbed the history of my usage, from a nice online table, saved it as an HTML file and opened it into Excel. It’s pretty easy to see that my usage grew slowly but steadily from about 250Mb in August 1999 when I first got cable through to round about 1Gb at the end of last year. This year it has grown rapidly — almost quadrupled in fact, from about 1 Gb in January to 2Gb in May to 3Gb in August and this month it’s already over 4Gb.
I’m imagining that has a lot to do with the podcasts and now enhanced video podcasts I subscribe to, so today I did some pruning. Fortunately NewtNewsWire Pro allows me to set individual subscriptions to a custom setting, so I’ve set a few to not download. Those are podcasts I’m still evaluating, and until I’ve made up my mind I can download episodes manually.
On comparing my monthly invoice to the current plans it seems we’re out of step again. My allowance is 5Gb per month, but current plans include 4Gb or 10Gb. I guess it’s a good thing the company honour existing plans and don’t force us to keep changing the package. Even so, I don’t really trust the Telstra Clear Saturn Paradise Vodafone megalopoly to have the customer’s best interests in mind.
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