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How Likely Am I to Use Over 5GB of Internet Service Per Month?

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Many mobile phone services cap their Internet service at five gigs per month, as of June 2011. If it sounds like a lot to you, you most likely don't have to worry about going over that limit. That five gigs becomes a lot less when you start watching movies, however, and if you use your phone as your primary mobile device, that five gig limit can come way too soon.

What Uses Up Bandwidth- Email

Uploading pictures, sending emails, downloading texts. All of these use bandwidth, which is how your Internet service is measured. Each time you send something or view something over the internet, you use bandwidth to do so. Each item has a file size. How big it is determines the bandwidth used.

For example, an email with no attachments is roughly 3KB in size. A 5GB internet plan translates to 5,242,880KB, or 1.5 million plain emails sent every month. Large images add 8 to 10KB per image. If you use your Internet simply for emails and the occasional photo, hitting 5GB will take a lot of work.

What Uses Up Bandwidth- Videos and Music

It's a lot easier to hit your limit if you start using you cellphone to download music or watch movies. A typical mp3 file is roughly 1MB per minute--that's more than 1,000KB a minute. Don't let that scare you--5GB of music is still more than 74 hours of new music a month.

Adding video to the mix is where your limit starts looming. Streaming videos from a site such as YouTube are roughly 5MB per minute instead of 1MB. Movies can get up to a gigabyte or more for each file. And an hour-long video chat session will take up more than 150MB.

Deciding if 5GB is Enough

Figuring out if you will hit your 5GB limit means looking at your Internet use. If you simply send emails, share a few pictures, and maybe watch that new viral video, 5GB per month is enough for your normal Internet habits. If you find yourself sending or receiving large files, it could get close. Once you start using your phone as a primary entertainment center, that 5GB limit will not be enough to keep up with your shows each month.