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I was looking over AT&T's wireless data plans (http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/popup/dataconnect-comp-table.jsp) and noticed the data caps and the overage charges. . .

Now, you'll notice that $60 gets you 5 gigabytes of data transfer, and that anything over that is charged at $0.00048 per kilobyte. Sounds small enough right? Wrong.

5 gigabytes is 5,242,880 kilobytes (http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/)

5,242,880 * $0.00048 = $2,516.58

Which means that if you used an extra 5 gigabytes you'd pay an extra $2,516.58, even though the first 5 gigabytes only cost you $60. It becomes obvious at this point that the overage fee is ridiculously high. If the overages were anyplace near the original fee they'd be closer to $0.000011444 per extra kilobyte. The overage charge is about 41.943 times larger than the original fee. . .

What's 5 gigabytes you might wonder. . . well CD-ROMS hold a maximum of about 700 megabytes, but tend to average about 650 megabytes. A gigabyte is about 1024 megabytes. So 5 gigabytes is about 5,120 megabytes.

5120 / 650 = 7.877

So basically AT&T (and other wireless data providers) want you to believe that transferring the amount of data that could fit on about 8 CD-ROMS is worth $2,516.58

Ummm. . . I'm thinking they can do better than that. Drop the data caps, or at the very least make the overage charges actually reasonable.

Wireless Data Math by Phillip J Rhoades is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at ungab.com.