<p>My dad is in IT and he swears it is, but I spend a lot of time on the computer and I have no idea how long 4 GB will last me. Also-how do they regulate that? Does the internet just stop working after you've exceeded your bandwith, or do they charge you when you go over?</p>
<p>It just slows down a lot when you go over.</p>
<p>I’ve made a few posts elsewhere about this, but 4gb is totally not enough for me. You are not me though, so obviously it differs.</p>
<p>First off, anything you do on google, wikipedia, and most online text-based websites will eat though way less than 4gb. It will probably max out at a few hundred MB, if that.</p>
<p>However, are you a big downloader? Do you download a lot of music? Movies? Taking a look at iTunes, I just bought an album yesterday. It was of average size and had average length songs. It took up 100MB. That’s not that bad, we still have plenty of space. However, let’s look at movies.</p>
<p>If I wanted to download (for the sake of example, I will use the first movie on the iTunes Store page) the movie Knowing, it would take up a lot of space. A regular quality version is 1.58GB, High Definition is 3.83GB.</p>
<p>Oh, 3.83GB. That comes out to 3921 MB. If you have 4GB, you are basically totally used up at this point. 4GB = 4096MB (using the 1024 system, which I believe UT uses for calculations, don’t worry about that though). Now, what if you wanted to watch another movie this week? Nope. The download speed would be terribly slow and it would take forever. This would kick in once you go over 4GB, and you would pretty much already go past that.</p>
<p>So, the 10GB package would be my pick. But wait! UT just upgraded so the 10GB is now 20GB. That’s totally plenty. I am a big movie watcher, and I always watch everything in 1080p (if I can get it) or 720p, high definition. I am really big on High def stuff. So I need lots of bandwidth. I also download lots of files, do remote database work, and work in remote desktop a lot. I also watch videos on YouTube with the high quality option turned on, that eats up more bandwidth than you think too.</p>
<p>I know I will use more than 4GB in a week. Hell, here at home I know I use over 50GB in a week, during the summer. I will clearly cut back when I get to UT. I’m still going with the 20GB package, since during the school year that will certainly be enough for me.</p>
<p>I figure I will watch one movie at week at least, maybe two. So I will use up a little under 10GB in that (always high definition for me). That still leaves me with 10GB for general usage, more than enough for a week. That’s why I was still content with the 10GB package, but making it 20GB for free as an upgrade is just awesome.</p>
<p>Plus, it’s not much more expensive compared to the 4GB plan. You’re already spending thousands for housing, what’s $50 more? [It’s the same logic for people buying nice cars: if you’re already spending 70k on a car, what is a few hundred more dollars for a navigation system and leather interior?]</p>
<p>It depends on what you’re doing. You can probably figure out what you need by using a bandwidth tracker at home or wherever you are to get a good idea on what an average week will be like for you.</p>
<p>Personally, I’ve always used Tier I, good enough for watching Hulu, etc, unless you watch a lot of it. You can also always upgrade later, if you need to, and can set up the system to send you an email when you’ve hit a certain percentage use for the week.</p>