A friend of mine that I cannot see often enough asked me today what where my hobbies. As a geek I must have geek hobbies. One of them is to play with Google.
My friend also asked me how much it would cost to listen to streaming radio for one hour on my iPhone.
The canadian iPhone carrier does not offer unlimited data plans.
So lets calculate using the 1 GB monthly data transfer offered by Rogers' iPhone 3G Voice & Data Packages. So if I add the $6.95 System Access Fee and the 50¢ 911 Emergency Access Fee to that base $60 plan I get $67.45 per month before taxes.
Where does Google fit in all this you might ask? In addition to do web search (duh), you can use it as a cool calculator and unit converter.
For the sake of our example, lets use a stream encoded at 32 Kilo bits per second (Kbps). One hour of streaming that station on my iPhone will cost me almost one dollar.
Another way to put this: You can stream that live radio station non stop for a bit over 3 days using the basic 1 GB data plan.
Now if Rogers could only follow AT&T's example with an "unlimited" data plan.
Of course when my iPhone is connected through WiFi (which is 80% of the time) my data transfer costs go down to $0.
