U.S. Mobile Internet Traffic Nearly Doubled This Year

An anonymous reader sends this news from the NY Times Bits Blog: "Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year, up from 690 megabytes a month in 2012, according to Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, who published a new report on industry trends on Monday. Worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month this year, up from 140 megabytes last year, he said."

Ads?

[Animats]

What fraction of the increase was ads?

Let me wish Verizon a Unhappy Christmas

[paiute]

Yes, this huge volume of traffic totally makes their overage charge of $1.99 per MEGABYTE if you go over your 2 GB monthly limit. Why do I fucking pay 15 dollars per gig for the first 2 and then 2 thousand dollars for the next one? Is it to lull me to sleep and then ram a huge charge up my ass? Because it feels like it.

Did I mention fuck Verizon? I went into a store, but the guy said there were no more iPhone 4s available anywhere. I should get a 5 - all the 4s had been sent back to Apple. Went home, found a 4s on the Verizons website for 99 cents. Do the stores and the website belong to the same organization? Because it doesn't feel like it.

The only bright spot about dealing with Verizon is the followup quality control call which lets you scream obscenities at the corporation for a few minutes.

Too expensive, capped, and slow.

[antdude]

I still don't own a mobile smartphone because of this. I want to have affordable one like landline uncapped fast ones.