I've been predicting the downfall of cable ISPs like Comcast for well over a year now, saying that they were going to be steamrolled by cellular internet providers within 5-10 years.
I had been doing my predictions with 500 GB/month as the amount I use the internet at home, since that's the limit of what Comcast offers me, so I was looking at the plans the cellular companies were offering and seeing how much longer until they offered 500 GB/month at a similar price and came up with 5-10 years.
Today, I decided to actually figure out how much I use my home internet. I used two numbers:
1 - The amount of data downloaded since my last reboot, as reported by Activity Monitor. 6 GB.
2 - The length of time since my last reboot, as reported by "uptime" in Terminal. 9 days.
Extrapolating, it looks like I use about 20 GB/month at home. I'm also on a 6 GB/month mobile plan from AT&T. So it seems that AT&T's 30 GB/month plan would provide me with all of my data needs, both at home and while away.
Here's all the details I've worked out:
- My home speed would be increased from about 28 MB/s to 40 MB/s, an increase of 42%, with the potential of improving further as AT&T improves their network to compete with Verizon and T-Mobile. Meanwhile, Comcast believes they have a monopoly on home internet lines and is unlikely to bother improving it at all (they haven't in 5 years, why would they now?)
- My AT&T bill would increase by $30/month (I get a discount through my employer - without that discount it would increase by $40/month).
- My Comcast bill would decrease by $30/month (I'm still stuck with them for TV).
Here's the stuff that I'm not so sure of:
- I run a small website off of my iMac with around 200 visitors a month. This required me setting up port forwarding on my router. It also relies on the fact that the IP address of my modem from Comcast never changes. How would I do something similar over AT&T's cellular network? I know that I could move my website to be hosted somewhere else, but I really like having near full control of my website, where at any time I can just throw up some new server side code.
- I play games online a lot - would those work over AT&T's network or would they block the required ports? (Namely, I play a lot of StarCraft 2... I also play on the Wii U sometimes.)
- I figure I can just use Mobile Hotspot on my iPhone to browse the web and use email on my computers...
Thoughts? Are there important things to consider that I neglected to think of? Also, does anyone know have any insight into the things I don't know about?
I had been doing my predictions with 500 GB/month as the amount I use the internet at home, since that's the limit of what Comcast offers me, so I was looking at the plans the cellular companies were offering and seeing how much longer until they offered 500 GB/month at a similar price and came up with 5-10 years.
Today, I decided to actually figure out how much I use my home internet. I used two numbers:
1 - The amount of data downloaded since my last reboot, as reported by Activity Monitor. 6 GB.
2 - The length of time since my last reboot, as reported by "uptime" in Terminal. 9 days.
Extrapolating, it looks like I use about 20 GB/month at home. I'm also on a 6 GB/month mobile plan from AT&T. So it seems that AT&T's 30 GB/month plan would provide me with all of my data needs, both at home and while away.
Here's all the details I've worked out:
- My home speed would be increased from about 28 MB/s to 40 MB/s, an increase of 42%, with the potential of improving further as AT&T improves their network to compete with Verizon and T-Mobile. Meanwhile, Comcast believes they have a monopoly on home internet lines and is unlikely to bother improving it at all (they haven't in 5 years, why would they now?)
- My AT&T bill would increase by $30/month (I get a discount through my employer - without that discount it would increase by $40/month).
- My Comcast bill would decrease by $30/month (I'm still stuck with them for TV).
Here's the stuff that I'm not so sure of:
- I run a small website off of my iMac with around 200 visitors a month. This required me setting up port forwarding on my router. It also relies on the fact that the IP address of my modem from Comcast never changes. How would I do something similar over AT&T's cellular network? I know that I could move my website to be hosted somewhere else, but I really like having near full control of my website, where at any time I can just throw up some new server side code.
- I play games online a lot - would those work over AT&T's network or would they block the required ports? (Namely, I play a lot of StarCraft 2... I also play on the Wii U sometimes.)
- I figure I can just use Mobile Hotspot on my iPhone to browse the web and use email on my computers...
Thoughts? Are there important things to consider that I neglected to think of? Also, does anyone know have any insight into the things I don't know about?
