I am on my first week of using 3G and am really surprised at how much usage steaming radio ( listening to ballgame from AM station) is eating up. I used about 100 MB listening to just 3 hours. Does that sound about right? I wish I could tell what activities are consuming what usage so I could decide what to avoid. I am not viewing videos or email and only hitting a couple forums for sports team info.

Radio stations stream at different rates so there is no quick answer. Usually internet stations indicate their streaming data rates in Kbs (Kilobits per second)... Some stream at 12 Kbs, other can stream at 128 Kbs... There are many rates in between. The higher the rate, the better the audio quality and the more bytes you have to download.

So for example, consider a station streaming at 56 Kilobits per second (which is a fairly decent quality).

There are 8 bits in a byte, so:

56 KiloBits per second divided by 8 = 7 KiloBytes per second

There are 60 seconds X 60 minutes = 3600 seconds in an hour.

7 KiloBytes x 3600 = Approximately 25 MB (Mega Bytes) per hour that you need to download.

I love it when someone else does the math!

Originally Posted by jwt873

Radio stations stream at different rates so there is no quick answer. Usually internet stations indicate their streaming data rates in Kbs (Kilobits per second)... Some stream at 12 Kbs, other can stream at 128 Kbs... There are many rates in between. The higher the rate, the better the audio quality and the more bytes you have to download.

So for example, consider a station streaming at 56 Kilobits per second (which is a fairly decent quality).

There are 8 bits in a byte, so:

56 KiloBits per second divided by 8 = 7 KiloBytes per second

There are 60 seconds X 60 minutes = 3600 seconds in an hour.

7 KiloBytes x 3600 = Approximately 25 MB (Mega Bytes) per hour that you need to download.

Thanks, I thought usage would be less. I'm using the free tunein radio app.