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What in holy blazes, 60 gigabytes in a month just for one fucking stupid app?

1) what carrier does that girl have? And at what cost? With German internet prices, we'd look at a 500€ per month alone for data, not to mention other data using apps, calls, SMSes...

2) what the fuck, I use Netflix at home quite regularly and rarely exceed 50 GByte (I'm on a 50/5 VDSL so it isn't a lack of speed) of traffic. How many billions of crappy front cam selfies can be shared in 60 GB of data?



> 60 gigabytes in a month just for one fucking stupid app?

And they don't even look at the pictures!


maybe snapchat should take note and send a 100byte version first with progressive improvement if the image is visible for more than 0.8 seconds (or whatever the threshold is).



I think one or both have no no clue about gigabytes. It has to be video. Lots of video.


Probably streaming and replaying youtube videos, or something similar. Not that hard to run through several gb in a few hours. Multiply by 30 (days/month) and you can see 60 gb a month being easily doable.

Torrenting games and 1080p movies is even worse - at 10-60 gb a pop, the time to hit a 300 gb cap is limited only by your download speed.


You are not the typical user. You can just get an unlimited tarif and be done with it.


> You can just get an unlimited tarif and be done with it.

Um, if you're in the U.S. probably not. Most have some kind of limits even on 'unlimited' such as your connection goes to ISDN speed.

Even my cable modem has a 350GB a month cap which I occasionally exceed.


> Um, if you're in the U.S. probably not. Most have some kind of limits even on 'unlimited' such as your connection goes to ISDN speed.

Yeah... but in Germany the biggest cap available is 10GB for 25€ (http://www.billiger-telefonieren.de/mobiles-internet-verglei...) and these are data-only SIMs, truly unlimited does not exist for us.

On the other hand, while shockingly low caps are generally accepted on mobile, people do protest whenever a provider tries to place caps on landline (VDSL, DOCSIS) contracts.


Germany is literally the exception. Even in the US you can get high data caps on mobile. Also some of that data will go via wifi.


I'm in the UK, and pay £33/m ($50) for unlimited 4G data, calls and texts, of which 12GB can be used for tethering. It includes roaming to 14 other countries at no extra cost. This is on a 1 month, SIM-only contract on Three. I think this is good value.


In the US it's not an issue to have 60GB per month. Neither on mobile nor on cable.


Well, no, it's not an "issue"... if you're willing to pay $375-475/month for a 60GB mobile data plan.


> Well, no, it's not an "issue"... if you're willing to pay $375-475/month for a 60GB mobile data plan.

What plans are you looking at? For a family of 4, unlimited data on T-mobile for instance costs 150 USD for the entire family or 37.5 USD per phone.


T-mobile, to be sure, I didn't look at. But with that plan, "if you are in the top 3% of users" (which 60GB/month is likely to be, especially as that's just one of those four users), your data use will be slowed to 2G speeds.

"typical download speeds of 40Kbps-200Kbps and upload speeds of 20-80 Kbps"

Snapchat is going to get pretty painful pretty quickly.


But nobody uses 60GB of data on data only. When you're at home you're typically connected to Wifi. Also in many ways that's besides the point. Usage on mobile devices is skyrocketing and in particular young users are the reason for it. At this point high data usage per month is not exactly an exception but the norm.


Maybe I should have read more closely, my assumption was that that referred to cellular data.

But in principle, I absolutely agree with you. Caps, etc? Should go away, yesterday.


I have an associate who travels and eschews wifi. He used like 75GB/month.


I didn't fully read the article but I've got wifi at home, wifi at work, wifi at uni. My phone automatically connects to all of 'm. Hell I've got wifi at some friends, even at the parents of my gf when I stayed over for a weekend.

So most of my data use is not from my phone's data plan. Did she specify it was?

That having been said, 60gb is a shitload and I think 1) it may not be true and 2) she's an outlier who uses snaps for scoring. While undoubtedly more people do that, most young people I know send a few snaps a day at most, not 40 over breakfast.


> What in holy blazes, 60 gigabytes in a month just for one fucking stupid app?

I didn't get the impression from the article that this was exclusively snapchat. I agree you'd have a hard time hitting 60gb/mo unless you're streaming a lot of video. To be fair, snapchat does have video, and the whole point of this exercise is that we cannot fathom how The Children use it these days, so...who knows.


If she has an iPhone, just auto-backup to the cloud might cost her much more bytes than the picture alone. (They actually shoot a short video for each picture.)


Snapchat doesn't autobackup to the cloud. It's whole thing is that it's ephemeral.


It's funny how they dodged several technical challenges by deciding to do that.


Snapchat is not, but does the iOS camera app that takes the picture do the backup?


The photo is taken by Snapchat, not the camera app.




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