Everyone needs data. But how do you get it and how much does it cost? Cable modem, cell phone data plan, voice minutes, text messages. Really, it isn't easy to compare these but fundamentally they are the same thing. In fact, I believe that eventually we will just pay one fee for data and it won't be split into these silly little types.

What I would like to get is a comparison of how much it costs to get your data for a mobile device. In this case, you can have three things: data (really they are all data), voice, and text messages. Typically, a service provider will charge you differently for these different things.

I would love to get how much each data mode costs per amount of data ($ per GB). Is this easy? No. Why? Because you aren't charged a rate like this. For instance. AT&T charges $25 for a 2 GB data plan. In this case, I could consider that the data costs $12.5 per GB. However, what if you don't use all 2 GB of data? What if you just use 700 MB during that month? Oh, what if you go over 2 GB? What then?

So, maybe you see the problem. Here is my solution. I will look at several providers. For each, I will take a typical user and estimate how much they use and how much they pay. Then I will make a maximum data use scenario. Don't worry, this might make sense after I do it.

Some Starting Estimates ———————–

How much data do you use? I am really going to just have to take some guesses here. Let me create a typical person (called Joe). This person has a smart phone with the following uses. (I am ignoring multimedia messages for now)

Talks on the phone for 500 minutes a month. I totally just made this number up. Just picking 8 kbps data rate (I know it is actually more complicated than that), this would be 0.0285 GB.

500 plain text messages a month. Let me pretend that that the average text message is 40 characters long. If I assume each character is 1 byte, then this would be 1.86 x 10 -5 GB.

GB. My fake average person uses 600 MB of data (web pages, email, songs and stuff). If use 1024 MB per GB, this is 0.586 GB.

Now I need a power user. What is the maximum that you could use? Oh, let me call this person Zelda.

Photo via Mike Licht

There are around 43,000 minutes in a month. Can you talk that long? No. Plus if you aren't on AT&T you can't talk and use data. So, let me say this person talks for 3 hours a day. That would be 5400 minutes. This would be 0.309 GB.

How many texts could you send a month? What about 10,000? That would be around 330 a day. If each text message took 30 seconds to type, that would be almost 3 hours of texting. Ok. Good enough. This would be 3.7 x 10 -4 GB.

GB. 5 GB of data on a phone seems like quite a bit. I have a difficult time seeing how you could get up to 10 GB on just a phone. Sure if you are streaming videos all day. Ok, I will go with 10 GB - this is Zelda we are talking about.

Note: AT&T has this interesting data use calculator. Basically, you estimate how much stuff you do and it will give you a guess for how much monthly data that would be.

Now for the carriers. Note that there are a whole bunch of numbers below. If you are allergic to math, skip to the bottom for some pretty graphs.

AT&T——————————————————————————————————-

Just looking at plans for individuals, what does AT&T offer?

Voice:

AT&T offers so many minutes for so many dollars. If you consider this a rate-plan, how much would it cost per GB? Let me once again assume that the voice call is 16 kbps (total guess). This is the same as 1.144 x 10-4 GB per minute. The lowest plan gives 450 minutes for $39.99 ($0.089 per minute). This means that your cost per GB would be (I will call this r v - for voice rate):

The 450 minute plan charges $0.45 for each additional minute. The 900 minute plan charges $0.40 for each additional minute.

For AT&T's other plans:

450 min for $39.99. This is $0.089 per minute or $1,558 per GB.

900 min for $59.99. This is $0.067 per minute or $1,172 per GB (a bargain, really).

Unlimited (let me use 5,400 minutes) for $69.99. This is $0.013 per minute or $228 per GB.

For Joe and Zelda, this would be:

Joe on the 450 minute would have to pay extra (due to the extra 50 minutes). His cost would be $62.49 or $0.12 per minute ($2,100 per GB).

Joe on the 900 minute would pay $0.12 per minute. So, this is the same rate as above.

Zelda on the 450 minute plan would not be pretty. She would have almost 5000 minutes overtime for a total cost of $2287. This is $0.42 per minute ($7353 per GB).

Zelda was also go over minutes on the 900 minute plan. It would cost her $1860. This is $0.34 per minute or $5952 per GB.

Texting:

Really, there are two options here. You can pay $20 for unlimited text messages (call this plan A) , or $10 for 1000 messages a month ($0.1 per additional message) (plan B). So, how much would this cost? Let me break this into 4 cases. Joe on both plans and Zelda on both plans.

Joe on plan A: $1.08 MILLION per GB.

Joe on plan B: $538,000 per GB.

Zelda on plan A: $54,000 per GB.

Zelda on plan B: Note that she will go over her limit. This means she will pay $10 for the first 1000 messages. If she sends 10,000 total, she would have to pay 10 cents for the other 9,000 messages. The total cost would be $910 which would be $2.5 MILLION per GB.

Data:

It seems there are three plans. A) $45 for 4 GB plus $10 per GB over. B) $25 for 2 GB plus $10 per GB over. C) $15 for 200 MB. How much would this cost Joe and Zelda?

Joe A: $76.80 per GB.

Joe B: $42.67 per GB.

Joe C: Here, he will go over the 200 MB limit. The rule says you get another 200 MB for $15 so his cost would be $45. $76.80 per GB.

Zelda A: Of course she goes over the limit on all of these plans. For A, she will pay $105 for $10.50 per GB.

Zelda B: She pays $105 again. $10.50 per GB.

Zelda C: 10 GB of data is 10240 MB. This means she would have to buy 52 "blocks of 200 MB" for a cost of $780. This would be $78 per GB.

Verizon——————————————

Voice:

It seems like their most common plan is 900 minutes for $59.99 and $0.4 for every minute over. Verizon sort of makes this difficult as they bundle voice minutes and text. Let me just go with the above plan. How much for Joe and Zelda?

If you use the whole time allowed, that would be the same as AT&T ($1,172 per GB.)

Joe would only use 500 minutes of this. He would pay $0.12 per minute or $2,100 per GB).

Zelda would go over her minutes. She would have to pay $1,860 or $0.34 per minute. This would be $5952 per GB.

Texting:

I am not sure what to do about texting here. You could pay $79.99 for 900 minutes plus unlimited text messages. So...how do I separate voice and text? Really, I shouldn't have even done the stuff above. Ok. Here is what I am going to do. The $59.99 plan has $0.2 per text message. There I have two plans. How much would data cost for Joe and Zelda (not including internet data)?

Joe Plan A: It is the same as above except that he also has 500 text messages. This would cost $100. Total price per GB would essentially be $5,602 per GB.

Joe on Plan B: Joe's total cost would be $79.99. This would be $2,801 per GB.

Zelda on Plan A: This would be the same as for just voice (essentially). Oh sure, she gets all those text messages for free. Big deal, that is just a very very very small amount of data. So, it will still be $5952 per GB.

Data:

Verizon offers two options. $10 for 75 MB or $29.99 for unlimited.

Joe on the $10 option would cost $80. This would be $136.51 per GB.

Joe on the unlimited plan would pay $51.18 per GB.

Zelda on the $10 plan is just silly. It would cost her $1370 for $137 per GB. Actually, this is about the same as Joe - so maybe not so silly.

Zelda on the unlimited plan would cost her $3.00 per GB.

T-Mobile————————————

T-Mobile, I am going to do something special for you. You have too many plans, so I will make some graphs. First, they offer unlimited minutes unlimited text with different data plans. Since these plans all have the same voice + text, it should say something about the data plans. Let me write the monthly bill like this.

The B is your monthly bill (in $). The r v the rate that you pay for voice (in $ per GB) and the V is the amount of voice data you use. I guess you can see the pattern for both the text data and the data-data. For the first set of plans, voice plus texting is constant. So, I can write the bill as:

Where the C is some constant. Ok, so here is plot of the price per month versus the data plan.

From this plot we can see that the y-intercept is $65.33 and the slope is $5.42 per GB. You can also see that the jump in price from no data to 200 MB is crazy out of proportion. So, the $65.33 must be how much you pay for unlimited voice and text.

T-Mobile also offers different data plans for 500 minutes of talk. This also has a constant for for voice plus text, but it is a different value. Let me call it K. Here is that plot.

This has the same slope, but an intercept $10 less. So, I guess going from 500 minutes to unlimited minutes costs $10. T-Mobile also offers a plan with 500 minutes, no data, no texts for $39.99. This must indicate that unlimited texting is $10 a month.

Ok. Now for Joe and Zelda. Let me just pick a plan for each of them and figure out how much they pay for data.

Joe:

First, for Joe. Since Joe doesn't use that much data and doesn't talk more than 500 minutes, he will get the $69.99 plan. How much data does he use? He has 0.0285 GB for voice, 1.86 x 10-5 GB for text messages and 0.586 GB for internet stuff. This is a total of 0.614 GB. His total rate is $114 per GB.

If I assume his texting is $10, then he pays $537,000 per GB for text data.

From the graphs above, it seems like internet data costs $5.42 per GB. From these two, I can determine the voice rate. 2 GB of data would cost $10.84 and another $10 for texting. This means $49.15 is for the 500 minutes of talking ($0.098 per minute). This is an equivalent of $1716 per GB.

Zelda:

Zelda is going to get the biggest plan. Zelda uses a total of 10.309 GB for a cost of $119.99. This is $11.54 per GB.

Since Zelda pays the same $10 for texting, but uses much more, she pays $27,000 per GB.

How much does she pay for voice? Well, $10 for texting and $54.20 for data then $55.79 for the voice data ($0.010 per minute). This would be $175 per GB.

Home Data ———

Let me also look the data you get for your home network - just your internet use. How much do you use and how much does it cost. I am just going to take stab in the dark. If you have kids and they watch streaming videos, maybe you can get up to 10 GB a month for your home network. Sure, it could be lower or higher, but this should be a good starting value. I suspect if you averaged all USA home internet data, it would be less than 1 GB a month (since there are many people that just don't stream too much stuff).

How much would this cost? There are so many plans and providers, it is difficult to say. Let me just look at two - AT&T U-Verse (since that is what I have) and Comcast cable modem.

AT&T U-Verse lists internet only plans from $20 to $50 per month. Let me go with the $30 a month plan. This means you would be paying $3 per GB for your data.

Comcast seems to have similar prices for just internet - but I had trouble getting a list. I think it should be around the $2-$5 per GB range.

Fed-EX Internet —————

What if I wanted to transfer 2 TB of data (2048 GB) by shipping a 2 TB hard drive. What kind of data rate would this cost (per month)? Just to be crazy. First, I would have to buy a drive. Amazon has a 2 TB for $80 (shipping weight of 2 pounds). So, I would get this drive and I would transfer my data. How long would this take? If I can get a data transfer rate of 500 MBps, that would be around 1 hour. I think that is crazy (but what do I know?). Let me say it takes 5 hours to get my data on the drive.

Next, I need to ship it. Suppose I want to send it from New York to L.A. FedEX lists a 2 pound package delivered overnight as $103.69. It says delivery by 8:00 AM (I guess that is Pacific Time). Also, not sure about when I can drop it off. Let me just say that the total transit (from door to door) is about 12 hours.

What is the price per GB? Simple, 2048 GB divided by the cost of $183.69 gives $11 per GB $0.09 per GB (thanks @perry!). What kind of data speed would this be? Looks like about 48 MBps.

Graphs ——

This is probably the part you are waiting for. How can you compare these rates if you don't have a graph. First, since the data is all unorganized above let me just show some stuff for AT&T. This is a plot of the data cost per GB for voice, text, and internet data. Since there were multiple plans, I used the ones that gave the best price.

Yes, the vertical axis is a log scale. Otherwise you would only see the cost of texting. Joe sure is getting screwed on texting.

Now to compare all the carriers (and my estimate for home data). In order to make things a little easier, I combined voice and texting together. So, I put the total cost of voice + texting over the data for voice and texting. Oh, there is no value for home voice - I left that off.

Maybe you don't like graphs with log scales. I get it. Let me put this one other way. Suppose you take your voice plus text data that gives you the best rate (Zelda on T-Mobile pays $212 per GB) and the most expensive data plan for Zelda is $10.5 per GB. If you had just $1 to spend on data, you could get 4.8 MB of data. That is like 1, maybe 2 mp3 songs. For the same dollar with the internet plan you could get 97 MB of data. This is like 27 - 30 songs (assuming a song is around 3 - 4 MB).

Final Comments ————–

What if you lived in a house that used water and your water company had a plan like this:

For drinking water, you pay $10 per month.

For watering your lawn, you pay $0.3 per hour.

For water used in your dishwasher, you pay $0.4 per gallon.

This is the same thing. Data is data. Oh, but voice data on the network gets different priorities and stuff. Sure, but you can also do Skype calls over your internet connection. You can do texting over your internet connection with google voice (and other services). It is possible to only use your internet data on your phone.

Pre-Emptive Comments: ———————

Yes, it is time for my responses to your comments BEFORE YOU EVEN ASK.