Steve Henson wrote:
> In article <1144061561.14012.0@damia.uk.clara.net>, see@signature.url
> says...
>
>>How will they know if you're using a laptop? And does using the phone as
>>a modem with a PDA break the rules? Some phones are PDAs anyway, but a
>>laptop and a PDA both use the same methods of connecting so whats the
>>difference- how will they know?
>>
>
>
> I don't think they can tell. The rule (and some of the others) are
> largely there to stop people going berserk and downloading huge amounts
> of data.
I believe the issue is not really to do with the *amount* of data, but
how constant the transfers are. An intermittent connection (ie.
download emails in a minute or two, read them at leisure, or download a
webpage, read, download another...) allows the GPRS time slots to remain
reasonably well contended. If you're streaming, or otherwise accessing
resources which keep the GPRS connection fully utilised, then the
contention ratio for the GPRS timeslots increases. One user doing this
might not be a problem, but by applying a policy where these practices
are in effect banned (not through a hard enforcement, but through
monitoring and probabilities) they have some ability to enforce it.
Using a laptop over GPRS is likely to result in higher GPRS
usage/timeslots due to the ease of multiple applications requesting
internet resources (multiple browser windows, email checking every
minute or two, radio streaming, Windows Updates etc).
As other people have pointed out - bandwidth is actually cheap - but
timeslots and cell resources are limited. I doubt a high data usage,
but at intermittent periods is a problem - but medium data usage for a
long period is likely to be more of an issue to mobile networks.
D