“Unlimited Broadband”

Unlimited: (dictionary.reference.com)

Broadband: (dictionary.reference.com)

A high-speed, high-capacity transmission medium that can carry signals from multiple independent network carriers. This is done on a single coaxial or fiber-optic cable by establishing different bandwidth channels. Broadband technology can support a wide range of frequencies. It is used to transmit data, voice and video over long distances simultaneously.

Taken from the first part of Crickets usage guide for their “Unlimited Broadband” package. This text is available only once you’ve paid for and received your cricket hardware, and is in the electronic terms of use that you must agree to before installing their software:

We reserve the right to limit throughput speeds or amount of data transferred, and to deny, modify or terminate service, without notice, to anyone whose usage adversely impacts our network, service levels or uses more than 5 GB in a given month.

They then go on to list “average download size” for different things as if to say “Hey, you get 5 gig. We’re not really limiting you, because look at all you can do”.

E-mail (1 text page without attachments)……3 KB
Word Document (5 text pages)……70 KB
Web Page……150 KB
Photo……..500 KB
PowerPoint Presentation (20 pages text & light graphics)…..3 MB

I’ll address these one by one:

E-mail (1 text page without attachments)……3 KB

Let me look at my inbox. of the 50 on the first page, none of them are under 3K, and most have attachments or images. more like 50K average these days.

Based on this assumption, you would need to send and/or receive approximately 1,747,627 e-mails in a month to reach 5 GB

With a more realistic real-world estimate, you can still get 100,000 e-mails in a month. Okay. Still seems nice.

Word Document (5 text pages)……70 KB

That’s pretty close. I’ll give them this.

Based on this assumption, you would need to download approximately 74,897 Word Documents in a month to reach 5 GB

Web Page……150 KB

Really? 150K? Are they basing this on the Yahoo home page? (151K) Yahoo is known for optimizing their content down to the byte.
Let’s say I want to look at web comics. Penny arcade is just over 250K-275K for either the comics page or the news page.
xkcd (a black and white comic with no ads or text) drops low at 80K.

How about news sites?
CNN.com is over 500K for every single page on its site. Clicking through to an article leaves well over a megabyte, minimum. An article about
NASA with one small photo of the moon gave a total of 1.2MB.

Here’s a list of an average page from the top 10 web sites according to http://www.alexa.com/topsites

• Google search: 45K(text search)-80K(image search).
• Facebook profile page: 200K – 400K
• Yahoo: 150K(home page) 500K(news article)
• Youtube: 370K(home page) 500K(video page)(NOT including the video. average of about 10MB for a 3 minute video)
• Windows Live/Bing: Couldn’t keep a connection to this site or msn.com
• blogger.com: 70K(Home page) 300K(featured blog linked from home page)
• msn.com: Couldn’t keep a connection to this site or bing.com
• craigslist: 30K (Home page) 30K (average of random housing listings)
• myspace: 250K (Home page) 500K (standard profile 2.0 page WITHOUT “bling” or extra photos, so this is a low estimate)
• ebay: 200K (home page) 400K (average of 5 random listings).

Based on this assumption, you would need to look up approximately 34,952 web pages in a month (or over 1,000/day) to reach 5 GB

According to my tests, this is not true at all. Looks like about half, or 17000 web pages in a month. That gives you 600 a day. Okay.

Digital Photo……..500 KB

My cell phone takes larger pictures than that. 500K is a horrible estimate. Your standard 100 dollar digital camera takes photos that are about 2MB
in size. This is just silly.

Based on this assumption, you would need to download approximately 10,485 low resolution digital photos in a month to reach 5 GB

low resolution? How about this: 2500 standard resolution, or 500 high-resolution photos (from the uncle with the 350 dollar 10 megapixel camera)

PowerPoint Presentation (20 pages text & light graphics)…..3 MB

This is fair, but irrelevant I think. These things aren’t popular enough to be flying around.

Based on this assumption, you would need to download approximately 1,707 PowerPoint presentations in a month to reach 5 GB

Okay. I’ll try to keep it under 50 a day.

Lets do some real world math here. I don’t use the internet for just one of those things, I use the internet for all of those things, and a lot more that they didn’t mention that I would expect to be able to do on a broadband connection. We’ll go down the list.

Looking through my mail, I send/receive an average of 80 e-mails on a given day, not including spam. Over a period of one week, my average e-mail size per day came to about 40K. (a couple of invoices, a handful of web-sized photos, coupons sent in the mail, and several text only e-mails). This seems pretty standard, but may be above average for most. I’ll cut it in half to be fair bringing me to 1.6MB per day for e-mail, or about 50MB per month. This is actually very very low. For someone that reads even just one chain e-mail a day, it’s probably double that.

In my history for yesterday, I have 1100 web pages. This is high. Of course, it’s actually many more than that. When developing a website, I’ll hit “refresh” on the same page 30 times in an hour sometimes. I probably loaded1500 web pages. Either way, I’ll still cut that in half, and use 500 for the number. Using my web page data, the standard web page is about 251K according to averages. I assumed the “home page” size was just as important as the “content page” size, even though more time is probably spent on content, but I’m trying to be more than fair. 500×250K = 125MB per day of loading websites. 3.75 GB per month. If I were to use a more fair “weighted” formula, the web page size would be higher than that. However, it’s tough to determine just how many articles someone reads on a site on average, so I won’t get more complex.

So just with these numbers, I’m at about 4GB per month. (If I scale my usage way down to better represent an average user)

Now lets throw very popular sites like youtube or hulu into the mix. One 23 minute television show on hulu is about 60MB. If I watch 2 half hour shows and one full hour show on hulu a week (I actually probably watch more than that), I have another gigabyte or so of bandwidth that I’m using.

What about other standard things that people do on the internet? What if you download music from itunes? (about 100MB per album) What if you want to download a demo for the lastest shooting game? (1-2GB these days). What if you want to watch a movie on netflix? (300Mb or so). Looks like you’re screwed.

So there you have it. Unlimited broadband doesn’t seem so unlimited any more. There is no way that I can continue to use this “unlimited” product on a daily basis.

Now that the “unlimited” factor has been shot to the ground, how about the “broadband”?

Even if you did have some bandwidth left over to watch some video, Cricket’s “broadband” isn’t fast enough to let you watch something on Hulu without having to pause it and buffer every few minutes. YouTube isn’t any better. To watch a 3 minute standard definition video uninterrupted, I need to hit play, hit pause, wait about 5 minutes for the video to load up to about 70%, and then hit play again. Don’t even THINK about watching something in High Quality or high definition. I gave up on a 50 second clip after waiting 15 minutes for it to load.

I don’t understand how this company can advertise their product as “broadband”, or even pretend to offer a replacement for DSL or cable providers. Besides all this, I can’t even stay connected to the “fast” network for more than 30-60 minutes at a time. It loses connection and defaults back to the slower-than-dial-up 2G connection. After disconnecting and immediately re-connecting, I’m returned to the faster counterpart.

Another note: While doing the page-size tests, my computer downloaded 14MB over 33 minutes. During that 33 minutes a web page was loading the entire time. This is just over 7K/second average download speed. According to my connection monitor, I had “good” or “great” (74-100%) connection strength the entire time. Dial-up AOL from 10 years ago would get a constant 4K/second download speed.

So what is that? What is this product they are selling? Pardon my language, but to me, it looks like a fucking joke. Too bad I can’t just return the modem and get my money back. Cricket offers a 1-day full money back guarantee, and a 3-day partial money back guarantee. Looks like I’ll be canceling my service, have to eat the 100 bucks for the modem, shipping, and activation, and not get the 50 dollar mail-in rebate for it. (You have to keep your service active to receive it).

Update  12/22/2009: This is the second busiest article on my site… Interesting.

Update  12/27/2009: I have e-mailed the marketing manager for Cricket regarding this and a few other issues I had with Cricket. I’ll post any developments.

Update 2/23/2010: About a week or two ago, a Cricket employee called me. They apparently finally got around to reading this article, and asked if I’d be willing to try their service again, for free. I have no use for their service at this time, so I politely declined. With Clear now available, I doubt I’ll ever be interested in a standard 3G service again, to be honest. It’s overpriced, and soon to be outdated in most parts of the country (and many parts of the world).