Mobile Web Stream Listening Gobbles Up Data Plans

Now that Google and Apple are launching their own online music services, the rise in internet radio usage is only going to keep growing in the foreseeable future, and that could mean a rise in the amount of people who are using up all of their monthly data allowance before the end of the month.

According to Andy Heaps at hybot.com, the downside to this popularity is the problem of data limits that a lot of broadband providers place on their service, and someone who wants to listen to internet radio for long periods of time each day, could very well find that they eat up their data allowance very quickly indeed. And if you are not careful, you will find you are going to get a hefty bill for exceeding your monthly data limit from your internet provider.

The thing about internet radio broadcasts is that they use more bandwidth the higher the quality is, and therefore that has a knock-on effect of using more data more quickly. Internet radio transmissions are typically downloaded in Kilobytes per second (Kbps) and the standard speed of an internet radio transmission comes in at around 128 to 320 Kilobytes per second.

In order to work out how much data your internet radio hobby is going to use up, you can use a simple calculation. If you download an internet radio transmission that comes in at 128 Kilobytes per second for 60 minutes then you will have used 57.6 Megabytes of data in that 1 hour. If you stream an hours worth of internet per day for 30 days then you would have eaten up 1.7 Gigabytes of data, and of course, the higher the quality of the broadcast, the more data you will be using up.

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