Streaming Web Radio usage

[bevlev11]

I'm having a hard time finding any definitive info on roughly how many MB's are used to stream radio from the web - I like to occasionally listen to radio on the web and have the 5GB/month plan. A "??MB's/hour" estimate would help me plan my usage. Thanks!

[dave1812]

I use  Pandora every day and sometimes for more than 5-6 hours at a time. My typical Pandora time per day is about an hour or more.  My last bill showed less than 2GB for the whole month and we use our Mifi for things other than Pandora. It's not much of a data hog--not like video.  I too, was intially concerned that many hours per day of using Pandora would chew up my data allowance.  It's really negligble and now I don't even bother to check my monthly usage throughout the month like I nervously did the first month and a half.  Enjoy the streaming radio!  (In fact I've had my Touch with Pandora running today as I write this, for the past hour+)

Message Edited by dave1812 on 08-10-2009 10:01 AM

[AlexSian]

to figure out megabytes per hour, find the audio bitrate as kilobits per second, multiple that times 3600 to get kilobits per hour, then divide that total by 8192 to arrive at megabytes per hour.

so, for instance, to figure out how any megabytes a 56 kb/s (kilobit per second) audio stream consumes in an hour:

56 x 3600 = 201600 kb/hr

201600 / 8192 = 24.609375 megabytes per hour

at that rate, you could do about 208 hours of streaming 56kb/s audio before you would be subject to overage charges.

208 hours/month would be about 6.9 hours/day, if you listened 30 days straight.

FYI, there is good info covering other methods of consuming data at http://www.EVDOinfo.com/5GB