PeopleTalentLink

Time to handle the music.

These companies are here to create money. That is priority numero uno. Good customer support, good prices, and good plans only exist to show a profit.

Companies used to offer unlimited plans until they weren't making just as much (read: we downloaded too much). That led the industries to generate the popular structure of:

Basic Plans - 50 Megabytes (MB) or less
'Average' Plans - 5 Gigabytes (GB)AC
Unlimited Plans
Okay, most people get what unlimited means, but what the heck is 50 MB or 5 GB?
It's not like cell phone companies where one can count minutes. We know what minutes are. Most of us read the time, constantly!

Tell someone you will be there in 5 minutes and they get that. Tell 'em you're going over your usage cap within the next 10 Megabytes and expect the "lost in space" look.

read more will demystify all of the jargon. I'll walk you through:

What you can do with 50 MB of data
What you can do with 5 GB of data
Everything you can't do with unlimited data
How to pick brilliantly select a plan to avoid the fret of using too much bandwidth.
Basic Plans
They're well, pretty basic. If you're not careful, you'll blaze through the 50 MB faster than Michael Phelps in water at the Olympics. It's just not a lot. Does that mean not to get it? Definitely not.
An efficiency plan could work if you only check email or see the web. Large files become questionable. Definitely look out for windows update. Some updates could be 100 MB or more. Very last thing you need is to get slapped with a gazillion dollar bill and all you did was restart your computer. Thanks Microsoft!
Downloading movies or music is just out the question. The average album is approximately 80 MB while movies are 700 MB at best. Needless to say, this leads us to elusive questions like "What's the meaning of life?" and...
"Man, just what exactly can 50 MB get me?"

Nielsen-netratings.com says the common U.S. websurfer loads 1,500+ webpages per month. Popular webpages could be junked up with ads so each one of these accounts for 100-200KB of data downloaded.

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- CNN.com is 93kb while Google is a mere 6 kb -
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This means that typically, a typical user will download over 20MB of data just doing 'routine' web surfing. That however, doesn't include email you might download using desktop clients like Outlook.
The issue isn't so much the e-mail here, but spam. When possible, try to avoid using Outlook to download all of your email. Get one of these web-based email service like Gmail or Yahoo. This way, should you choose get spam, it's in a folder you do not download (read: you shell out the dough).

Here's a table that summarizes what we've discussed so far:

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Activity/Download | File Size | # of that time period before you hit 50 MB
1 email | 10 KB | 5,000
1 webpage visit to CNN | ~100 KB | 512
1 downloaded song from iTunes | 4 MB | 13
1 typical 3 minute video on YouTube/Google | 5 MB | 10
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So, just need email? Then you can certainly get a basic plan. Or even, then maybe you have to consider:

5 Gigabyte Plans
I'll give it to you straight. A 5 GB plan covers most people's needs. It is not for power users. Now, how will you figure out if you're regular or perhaps a power user? Ask yourself these questions:

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Questions | Average User | Power User
Use the internet a lot more than 3 hrs/day? | No | Yes
Will an aircard be your primary connection? | No | Yes
Do you download movies or music regularly? | No | Yes
Do you stream movies/music regularly? | No | Yes
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Answered yes to more than 1 of these questions? Then you're probably a power user and should check out an unlimited plan. Uncertain? Have a look at:

So what can 5 Gigabytes get me?

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Activity/Download | File Size | # of times before you hit 50 MB
1 email | 10 KB | 500,000 times
1 webpage stop by at CNN.com | 100 KB | 5,242 times
1 downloaded song from iTunes | 4 MB | 1,250 times
1 typical 3 minute video on YouTube/Google | 5 MB | 1,000 times
1 hour of 56k audio stream | 25 MB | 200 hrs
1 typical 5 minute video on iTunes | 30 MB | 167 times
one hour of video stream or 2-way video chat | 52 MB | 97 hrs
1 typical 45-minute TV show from iTunes | 200 MB | 25 times
1 Full-length (2 hours) movie download | 1.5 GB | three times
1 entire DVD disk image | 4.5 GB | 1 time
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Unlimited Plans

Just the fact that you're reading this part probably means you may want this plan.
Whether you're on the go from airport to airport, building webpages or downloading movies and music, you stay connected. You're a power user through and through.

Mobile Broadband providers may tremble at the reference to your name. Nothing else but unlimited will suffice. In the event that's you, there are only a handful of carriers that provide unlimited mobile broadband. Start to see the end of this article for to purchase them.

While the plan may be unlimited, 'prohibited' uses will get you banned by your provider. Those include:

Always on connections such as P2P, BitTorrent, server devices
Spam
Auto-responders that generate 'excessive' traffic
Any form of hacking
Think of it in this manner. They just don't want one to suck up all of the internet for yourself like an industrial vacuum. Though it may be fun, it'd be selfish. Other than that, you should be fine.

So, to recap on which we covered:

Basic plans are great for just browsing the web and checking email
Average (or 5 GB) plans work well for most people
Unlimited plans are for power users who make an online search 'intensively'
Don't use mobile broadband for 'questionable' activities (Should you choose, I 'didn't see no thin!')
Now you know what each plan can get you. Heck, you probably know which one you'll get.
read more up though.

What if you get it and it's not working out for you? Or, You've already first got it and you realized that it's not for you? It'd really bite to be stuck for 2 2 years spending money on something you don't like.