AT&T has announced a new pricing plan for the iPhone that includes the ability to tether. Above photo by BryanMcDee.
What does this mean for the mobile real estate professional? It means you might not ever be without an internet connection.
There are two pricing plans, a DataPro plan that gives you 2GB of data and a DataPlus plan that gives you 200 MB of data. It will cost an additional $20 to have the ability to tether your iPhone. Tethering for iPhones will be available when Apple releases its new operating system this summer.
How much internet surfing can you do with the new data plans?
AT&T provides a data calculator to help you figure out how much data you will consume. For example, 200 MB of data will be enough to send/receive 1,000 emails with no attachments, plus send/receive 150 emails with attachments, plus view 400 Web pages, plus post 50 photos on social media sites, plus watch 20 minutes of streaming video.
How much data will a mobile real estate professional use searching a MLS or tax assessor website?
Click HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.
I was curious to know how much data I would use searching my local MLS or tax assessor website. There are numerous programs that help track bandwidth usage.
FreeMeter is a free program that tracks how much bandwidth you use. You do not need to install the program, just download and run the progam to track your data usage in real time.
To determine my bandwidth usage, I opened Google Chrome, logged into my MLS, and searched for sales in a subdivision. The search resulted in 7 sales in the past 6 months. This search used a total of 397 KB. I also searched the local tax assessor website for a property. The search used 87 KB of data and looking at the electronic plat map for the property used an additional 80 KB of data.
So what does this mean? Well, if you have the 200 MB data plan, you can search MLS 500 times a month or search the tax assessor website over 2,000 times.
Note: Be sure to turn off any additional programs running like ZumoDrive. Searching MLS with ZumoDrive running in the background took an additional 20 MB to complete.
Check out the FAQ at MacWorld if you have some questions about the new AT&T plans and tethering.
I am a heavy smartphone user. I constantly stream Pandora, use GPS, and browse the internet and am hard pressed to use more than 500 MB of data on my iPhone. This is because I am usually connected to a WiFi network either at home or in the office. For me, the change is welcome, at least for now.
But what about the future? What about GoogleTV and Hulu? Putting a cap on smartphone internet use could severely limit what people will do with their smartphones.
What do you think? Do you have the need to tether your smartphone to your laptop when you are out of the office? Will limiting the data slow down what developers will make for your smartphone?
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I’m not a fan of limiting data. Open up the floodgates and let us have some fun. My guess is that most people really don’t use the data they are given anyway. I don’t like plans where I have to keep a close eye on how much I have used. This reminds me of the first cell plan I ever had many years ago. I had something like 11 minutes to use during the day and then unlimited at night. Now that I have a plan with 3000 minutes per month (and I never use that much), it’s nice to not even think about it once during the month.
I agree with you on limited data, long term this might really hurt app development. But AT&T is doing a good thing and won’t gouge you, they will text you when you get close to your limit and if you go over they just automatically purchase another block of data for you instead of charging some ridiculous amount per MB. I will be able to downgrade my plan and save money each month without having to worry about getting a huge charge on my bill.
Hmm, interesting. That sounds fairly reasonable.
On another somewhat related topic, one thing that really gets me about cell phone companies is that we are paying for both incoming and outgoing calls in the United States. This is not how it works in countries like Japan, and that’s not how it works with landline phones in the United States. We are being taking advantage of as consumers for the time being because we ought to really only be paying for the calls we make. It is reasonable and practiced elsewhere in the world to only pay for outgoing calls, so it would seem reasonable here in the United States too. Let me bring it back home now. When I hear about data plans and being charged for going over minutes, it doesn’t leave a good impression in my mind because cell companies are already making an arm and a leg on us in the current system (because they can).
Good points Ryan! I didn’t realize in countries like Japan you don’t have to pay for both inbound and outbound minutes. It is crazy to think that I think it is normal to have to pay for this because I always have. Not only are the cell phone companies behind on things like pricing but the US is way behind other countries for network and download speeds.
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