Quote Originally Posted by Jon Wehrenberg View Post
If your phone can play movies and put internet on the computer why do buses have satellite dishes and why do people who want to work on their computer have a Verizon card for ???? per month. How much is 5 GB. Comcast won't tell me how much gigs I use on my computer.

Forgot to ask, how much does a phone cost and how much per month?
Satellite systems are good everywhere, not just where you can get a cell signal. Better system if you're in the boonies but much more expensive.

Verizon aircard is the same as tethering a smart phone, it's just personal choice. Anything that can be done with an aircard can be done with a tethered phone, including sharing the connection with a router. I am frugal approaching cheap, and am not going to pay for an aircard when I have unlimited data on my Droid.

Five gig is a lot for a casual user, but the fuzzy hubby likes to watch Youtube and subscribes to an amateur photography site both of which are data hogs. We both play Farmville, another data hog, so that's why we were going over the data limit regularly before.

As for how much you can do with 5 gb, here's some examples from a web page I found:

Stuff You Might Do How Much It Uses How Many Times Could You Do It With 300 MB How Many Times You Could Do It With 5GB
Email (no attachment)

3 KB 99,998 1,666,667
Update Facebook Status

25-40 KB 7,500 - 12,000 125,000 - 200,000
Word document

70 KB 4283 71,429
Web page look-up

150 KB 2003 33,333
Low resolution digital image

500 KB 600 10,000
PowerPoint presentation

3 MB 98 1,667
Download a Song (3 minutes)

3 MB 98 1,667
YouTube video (3 minutes)

15 MB 23 333
1 hour of Skype (audio) @ 64kb/s

28 MB 10 178
1 hour of MagicJack @ 128kb/s

56 MB 5 89
1 hour of Skype Video Chat @ 384 kb/s

169 MB 1.5 29
TV show download (30 minutes)

350 MB 0 14
Movie download

700 MB 0 7


But one big gotcha is downloading updates. I've had iTunes updates that were 100mb! Not many of those and you'll be over the limit too.