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Data Caps Are For Communists

AT&T recently announced its new iPhone data plans, and the free world let out a loud boo-hiss. They’re scrapping their unlimited data plan, and instead lowering their price $5 in exchange for a quota of 2GB per month. Mark my words: First quotas, next Bolsheviks. And we will have yet another thing for which to blame AT&T.

If geek acronyms don’t mean anything to you, just know that “2GB” translates into English for “as high-tech as a mimeograph machine.” (I’m showing my age.)

What’s a FacebookYouTubeAppStoreLovinFool to do? Here are some tips to avoid getting bit by the overage bug.

Know Thy Current Usage

If you’re a current iPhone user, there are two ways to easily find out how much data you’ve been using:

Go to your phone app’s keypad, enter *DATA#, then push Call. Yes, that’s right. This is not a text message, this is not an email: you actually dial *DATA# (which is the same as *3282#) as if it was a phone number and push Call. Don’t forget the asterisk at the beginning and the pound sign at the end. In reply, AT&T will send you a text message telling you your data usage for your current billing cycle.
Go to your iPhone’s Settings app, then hit General > Usage. Down at the bottom under “Cellular Network Data,” you’ll see how much you’ve sent and received since the last phone reset. When was your last phone reset? Look all the way at the bottom of the Usage screen, in gray innocuous letters under the Reset Statistics button.

Now take either of the above figures, and prorate them for 30 days to determine your average for a month. The above figures are in MB (megabytes), and since 1000MB = roughly 1GB (gigabyte), then AT&T’s new plan is offering 2000MB’s per month. If your calculation is below this, great! Just don’t change your usage dramatically, don’t start watching more YouTube, don’t start video-chatting with the new iPhone 4; just stay exactly the way you are and never grow, stretch, or evolve till you die. Okay?

My average 30-day usage was 5.7GB. Can I get a boo-hiss?

Know Where Bandwidth Sucks Live

You may be surprised to find out how much data you’ve been using. When I asked Michelle Bryner, a reporter for TechNewsDaily, to check her usage, she was certain she wasn’t sucking the Internet’s blood dry like a geektastic data leech such as myself. When she found out that her usage was approaching 3GB, we set about trying to understand where she had gone wrong as a human being.

Data will sneak up on you when you least expect it. The medium that requires the least data usage is text, like plain old emails. But watch out: what about those twelve baby pictures your Cousin Cathexis has been emailing you every day? Nabbed! Any image (or audio) transfer will incur a much higher dose of data than text. And these days, more and more web activity is image-based: surfing on your iPhone’s Safari browser, watching YouTube, streaming or downloading podcasts via iTunes, and of course, the pernicious sharing of baby pictures. What’s a gadget-wielding heterosexual to do?

How to Limit Your Usage (or, Have Less Fun & Pay AT&T For It)

There are some small tweaks you can make to reduce incidental data usage, but the biggest way to avoid overage charges basically involves delaying gratification, a skill that many techophiles have not practiced since, well, Steve Jobs’ iPhone keynote of January 2007.

1. Connect to Wifi Whenever Possible

When you’re connected to a wifi network, your data usage will not count against your AT&T quota. Yes, that means you’ll have to wait until you get to your home or office before indulging your habit. Advice for mayors: offering free wifi to your city’s residents will dramatically increase population density. Millions of iPhone users will flock to your walls. But, act fast: offer only lasts until Verizon puts out the iPhone.

2. Turn off Push

“Push” is when your iPhone gives servers permission to send it data even when you don’t request it by opening an app. For example, the Mail app can download new messages every single time one arrives in your Inbox. However, if you don’t check email on your iPhone every 83 seconds, you probably don’t need this. Go into Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, and turn Push off. While you’re there, reduce the frequency of the Fetch setting. If you set Fetch to “Manually,” your iPhone will only download new messages (and attendant baby photos) when you open the Mail app itself.

Individual apps may have their own settings to synchronize with servers on timers. You can find these apps’ settings in your Settings app. Turn off, or reduce the frequency, of all but the one you really use that much. C’mon, admit it, there really is only one that you actually use a lot. The other sixteen pages of apps are mere curios that you downloaded while biding your time on the John.

3. Use Different Apps, or Use Them Differently

Only the geekiest of the geeky, or the stingiest of the stingy, will take the time to implement this tip. Apps are proliferating that allow you to transfer some types of data over wifi or Bluetooth instead of over the cellular network. For example, instead of emailing your contact info to your colleague, use the Bump app to send your contact record directly to her iPhone when you’re both at the same meeting. Let us know your favorite such apps in the comments section, below.

4. Stop Breeding

As already noted, baby pictures are a major culprit in data usage, so either use a condom or just say no. You can reduce the incidence of data overages and STD’s with this one fateful decision. Also, since iPhones will be a lot less fun now, perhaps virile bachelors will stop carrying them everywhere in their pockets, thus mitigating the possible effects of cell phone radiation on our decreasing fertility rate.

Wow, maybe AT&T’s new data plans are a great thing, after all. Can I get a rah-rah? Didn’t think so.

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